From Brown to Green and Back: The Changing Meaning of Desegregation

Abstract

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA TOLLED THE BELL FOR JIM Crow America. The full significance of the Supreme Court's decision and opinion will be apparent only with the passage of more time; however, even now it is clear that in some respects Brown was a blessing but in others a bane. Most academic writing has emphasized the benefits rather than the burdens, although both have been considerable. In the 1960s and 1970s the Court strayed from Brown's original definition of desegregation in order to pursue a strategy of integration (through busing). This change was reversed by Court decisions in the 1990s, but the changes in education in the five decades since Brown have left public schools facing daunting challenges in the twenty-first century. When state or local governments insisted that black children attend separate schools, those governments were placing their stamp of approval on the doctrine of Negro inferiority. Elected officials were reinforcing the message that mean-spirited white people conveyed when they refused to shake hands with blacks; when they did not address black men as Mister but rather as boy, Howard, or nigger Jones; and when they called black women aunt or perhaps by their first name but never Mrs. Nevertheless, in the early 1950s neither Congress nor many state legislatures were prepared to end segregation. Segregation also tarnished the reputation of the United States at a time when the nation was vying with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World. American diplomats assured foreign leaders that segregation was a regional rather than a national practice, a relic of times past, and a policy that was on the way out. The Justice Department's amicus brief in Brown argued that desegregation was in the national interest because of foreign policy. Brown gave the U.S. government the decision it had been hoping for, and the State Department quickly made use of the ruling. Within an hour after the Supreme Court released its opinion, a Voice of America radio broadcast trumpeted the news abroad. (1) Brown also legitimized and helped to shape views that were emerging as a moral consensus among white Americans. In the Deep South whites vehemently opposed desegregation, but elsewhere most whites gradually accepted the principle that the government should not discriminate. (2) By contributing to the moral education of the nation, Brown helped to prepare the way for a civil rights movement that changed the way most white people thought about race. One should not overstate the magnitude of the change. In the classic study An American Dilemma (1944), Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal observed that even before Brown most whites were troubled by the contradiction between egalitarian principles and the reality of racial discrimination. Myrdal predicted that whites eventually would reform their practices to conform with their principles, but he also said that most whites wanted as few Negroes as possible in America. (3) Though that view is no longer expressed openly, many white homeowners continue to leave their neighborhoods if more than a token number of blacks move in, and most white parents with sufficient means take their children out of schools that become predominantly nonwhite. There is a paradox at the core of American racial thought. Most Americans oppose discrimination and support equal rights, but many blacks and most whites also favor a system of parallel development in which people voluntarily choose to live in communities that are predominantly of their own race, living, as W. E. B. Du Bois once recommended, by side in peace and mutual happiness with each group making its own peculiar contribution ... to the culture of their common country. (4) Brown was consistent with this pluralism. In ruling that government officials could not separate blacks from whites solely on the basis of race, the justices implied that it was no concern of the Constitution if the races were not evenly mixed because of geography, economics, personal choice, or other similar considerations. …