The Fate of an Idea Whose Time Has Come: Antidiscrimination Law in the Second Decade after Brown v. Board of Education

Abstract

The import of Brown v. Board of Education' is not confined to school segregation. Its more general significance stems from its relationship to the idea that racial discrimination is wrong and should be outlawed. Although the idea had been advanced and debated before 1954, Brown gave it a special prominence and a special legitimacy. In a sense, it set the idea loose. The idea became the organizing principle of a civil rights movement. By early 1964, at the end of the first decade following Brown, the movement had gained considerable momentum, and its ultimate victory seemed assured. Congress had before it a civil rights bill that seemed more momentous than other post-Brown civil rights laws (the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 being limited to voting discrimination). Public interest in the bill was unusually high due to a series of tumultuous events-the sit-ins, the March on Washington in August, 1963, and the assassination of President Kennedy, who had been identified with the civil rights movement and was the original sponsor of the legislation. The bill received the support of President Johnson and the Northern Democrats. But passage of the bill still required Republican votes to offset the opposition of southern Democrats. Then, on May 19, 1964, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, announced that he too was throwing his support behind the bill that he had long resisted. In his typically dramatic fashion, he borrowed a line from Victor Hugo: No army is stronger than an idea whose time has come.2 This announcement made enactment of the bill a virtual certainty, and on July 2, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. That occasion marked the end of one era-the idea set loose in Brown a decade earlier had indeed arrived-and the beginning of anotherthe one that is the focus of this essay. My concern is with this second post-Brown decade-more particularly, with the changes that the period