Brown's Reflection

Abstract

Just one week separated the Supreme Court's announcements of its decisions in Brown II' on May 31, 1955, and Williams v. Georgia2 on June 6, 1955. Del Dickson's fascinating account of Williams reveals the two decisions to be mirror images. Through his reconstruction of the Justices' deliberations in Williams, Professor Dickson shows the Court struggling with the same jurisprudential issues as in Brown II and reaching a virtually identical resolution-one that was novel, confusing, and ultimately misunderstood. The conventional account today of Brown II is that the Justices were so acutely aware of the political vulnerability of their 1954 decision in Brown I-so fearful about the prospects of Southern resistance to school desegregation and the Court's practical impotence in forcing compliance-that they retreated from the high ground of constitutional by endorsing the deliberate speed implementation formula. Some critics have maintained that the Court committed a strategic error in Brown II; they argue that the white Southern elite would have accepted a clear-cut desegregation order and obtained at least grudging popular acquiescence among its constituents, but the Court's pronounced tolerance for delay opened the way for successful demagogic appeals to massive popular resistance.3 Others have faulted the Court, regardless of its strategic sense, for allowing its fear of popular resistance to lead it to compromise and thereby abandon constitutional principle. These critics have readily invoked such honored aphorisms as delayed is justice denied or fiat justicia ruat caelum, the Latin formula which, as Dickson has ironically observed, is inscribed in marble above the Georgia Supreme Court's bench. Even Alexander Bickel, who praised Brown II as a proper acknowledgement by the Justices of the tensions between principle