Today marks the anniversary of the pivotal Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down on May 17, 1954. The decision marked the Supreme Court striking down the “Separate but Equal” clause that was at the heart of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case and marked the central feature of Southern society and politics. There have been several key Supreme Court decisions that have shaped American history. But it is no exaggeration, I believe, to argue that the America we live in today is a society shaped by Brown more than virtually anything else that has happened since.
As journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones have pointed out, America’s commitment to desegregation of schools has slipped backwards, not gotten better, since the 1970s. The federal government’s vacillating commitment to school desegregation—and the larger project of creating a truly desegregated society—defines much of American history. This is doubly true of American intellectual history. Questions about race, racism, and America were changed by the Brown v. Board decision. It was a decision shaped, of course, as much by the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the rise of independent nations in Asia and Africa as it was by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement at home.
Brown v. Board, then, was shaped by the intellectual currents of both anti-racism and Cold War liberalism then re-shaping American society in the 1950s. But the ways in which the federal government has retreated from the idea of fully implementing Brown—or, to be more accurate, merely doing the least to fix the issue of segregation with “all deliberate speed” as argued in Brown II—has shaped American thought and politics since the late 1960s.
Explaining how we got from Obama’s America to Trump’s America so suddenly also means grappling with the legacy of Brown. The idea of true integration in American society has a long way to go. In thinking about this question, I’ll simply leave a few links here for your reading pleasure. Please, by all means, also talk about how this looks in terms of American intellectual history.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the personal costs of not desegregating schools: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/choosing-a-school-for-my-daughter-in-a-segregated-city.html
Jamelle Bouie on the retreat from school desegregation: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/brown_v_board_of_education_60th_anniversary_america_s_schools_are_segregating.html
This, from 1964 by Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes how civil rights activists realized there was far to go on school desegregation: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/mlk-school-desegregation-report-card/552524/
And speaking of the Atlantic’s coverage, here’s a story about Alabama’s struggles with desegregation in 2014—from Nikole Hannah-Jones: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/segregation-now/359813/
One Thought on this Post
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Thanks for this, Robert. It’s important not to let anniversaries like this slip by without reflection.