Alienation or Empowerment? Law and Strategies for Social Change

Abstract

Most treatments of the civil rights movement of the 1960s include a discussion of the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education.' The underlying assumption in this ritual invocation is that political strategies based on or including legal reform are an effective means of bringing about social change. Brown is a symbol of the efficacy of legal reform. The classic interpretation of this symbol was given by Richard Kluger when he wrote: [Brown] meant that blacks had suddenly been redefined; black bodies had suddenly been reborn under a new law. Blacks' value as human beings had been changed overnight by the declaration of the nation's highest court.2 Thus, we are meant to believe that legislatively or judicially established legal rights are powerful forces of social reform that make important, direct, and lasting differences in the everyday lives of society's disadvantaged.