This Essay examines three legacies of Brown v. Board of Education. First, it describes the way in which the litigation campaign that culminated in Brown became the model for other strategic litigation campaigns aimed at obtaining court decisions substantially changing the law. Second, it explains how Brown should be understood as part of American political development, the collaboration by the Warren Court with the main lines of the political commitments of the New Deal and (later) the Great Society. Finally, it offers an account of the dissipation of Brown’s legacy in desegregating the schools that connects that development to the transformation of American politics in the 1970s and thereafter.
Essay
Both Victors and Victims: Prince Edward County, Virginia, the NAACP, and Brown
In 1951, the 450 students at the all-black R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, walked out of their school in protest against its unequal conditions, as compared with the all-white Farmville High School. The students became plaintiffs in one of the cases that came to comprise Brown v. Board of Education (Davis v. County School Board). County officials closed all the public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, to circumvent the desegregation ruling. This Essay explores the ways in which the quest for equal education by blacks in the county led them through a cycle of victimhood and victory.
Black on Brown
The most important and illuminating early writing on Brown v. Board of Education is a nine-page essay by Charles Black. Black memorably shows that segregation was a crucial part of a racial caste system. At the same time, he cuts through legal abstractions that made it difficult to answer the question whether the Court’s decision was sufficiently “neutral.” At the same time, Black’s argument suffers from two serious problems: formalism and institution-blindness. Black writes as if his interpretation of the equal protection clause can be simply read off the clause, and he does not engage the complex institutional problems that were raised by the Court’s decision. Nonetheless, the legal culture needs more voices like Black’s.