Implementation Of Brown Research Articles

The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness by Angie Maxwell (review)

Reviewed by: The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness by Angie Maxwell David Roediger (bio) The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness. By Angie Maxwell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. x, 324. $34.95 paper) The Indicted South is a well-researched and often stylishly written study of the intellectual history of the twentieth-century South. Angie Maxwell, who is a professor of political science and southern studies at the University of Arkansas, structures the book around the idea that a crabbed defense of the faith, ideas, economy, and inequalities [End Page 136] of the South matured in the face of sweeping attacks from within and outside the region. Such passionate defenses elbowed aside less extreme ideas. Each of the three major sections of the book follows such an arc and in each case the rightward turn coincides with an increased reliance on the words of origin texts to underwrite literally the arguments being made. In the first section, Maxwell shows Dayton, Tennessee, to be unremarkable in its commitments to fundamentalist religious certainties before it hosted in 1925 the Scopes trial and media circus over the teaching of evolution. However, after ridicule of the locale and region from Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, and others during and after the trial, the backlash assumed a hard edge to defense of the South. Dayton soon hosted Bryan College, named for the beloved William Jennings Bryan, who had made the case against evolution and died after making it. The school, Maxwell shows, was conceived as a monument to creationism and biblical literalism. The second section considers the “Southern Agrarians,” a group of young intellectuals who produced in 1930 the anthem to southern intransigence, I’ll Take My Stand. Maxwell traces the origins of the group to the earlier Nashville collaborations of the poetry group known as the Fugitives, who were at first in full flight from the “desert” of southern culture. They became by 1930 full-throated defenders of an imagined white South. Maxwell shows how the vitriol of Mencken and the context of the Scopes trial were reasons for this change, though she also demonstrates that defense of white supremacy was also much at play. Leading Agrarians soon pioneered the New Criticism in literary studies, making the close reading of classic texts the centerpiece of such study. In the third section, Maxwell offers an impressive reading of reaction to the Brown v. Board decision in Virginia in 1954, focusing on the state’s political elite and the writer James Kilpatrick. The particular importance of Virginia to the campaign of massive resistance to desegregating schools is brilliantly captured. So is the trajectory in which more moderate responses gave way amidst critiques of the [End Page 137] benighted South to a propaganda war against any implementation of Brown. Kilpatrick’s rediscovery of the states’ rights doctrine of “interposition,” with snatches of the U.S. Constitution providing the basis of a new literalism, cemented South-wide opposition to integrated schools. Each section, as well as a spirited conclusion on the recent past, contains significant insights, and the manuscript negotiates the tensions that run through the entire project. Nonetheless, those tensions are real. The respect for conservative and religious ideas that animates the project proves much more possible when a Bryan or a Robert Penn Warren is under consideration than when matters devolve to weighing Kilpatrick, whose ideas on interposition are ultimately dismissed as a “guise” (p. 171) with “insincerity” (p. 233) as their hallmark. Such judgments also signal the book’s productive difficulty in disentangling the impact of being made to feel inferior from the desire to defend a system of white supremacy. In discussing the Scopes case, although Bryan’s racism is nicely sketched, it is possible to keep the indicted South and the white supremacist South distinct. But for many of the Agrarians and for Kilpatrick, Maxwell acknowledges that the desire for absolution from inferiority was twinned with a desire to be free of “race guilt” (p. 185). David Roediger DAVID ROEDIGER is Foundation Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. His most recent book...

Black Teachers, Black Students, Black Communities, and Brown: Perspectives and Insights from Experts

This study sought to understand the impact of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision for Black teachers, Black students, and Black communities by eliciting and interviewing expert researchers in the field of education who have studied Brown in some depth over the course of their respective careers. Findings from the three expert participants point to Black-teacher demotion and Black-teacher voicelessness as two of the consequences of the Brown decision for Black teachers. In addition, the study revealed that issues around Black teachers, post-desegregation, cannot be studied in depth without considering the relationship among Black teachers, Black students, Black communities, and Brown. BACKGROUND In this article, we consider the impact of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision of 1954 on the desegregation of public schools in the United States of America, and secondarily on the provision of better learning opportunities for Black students. To this end, we identified researchers in the field of education, noted scholars whose research addressed issues pertaining to the Brown decision. They were interviewed and asked to address several salient questions that might help educators better understand the impact of Brown on Black teachers, Black students, as well as Black communities. Three main issues provide the impetus for this study: (a) the Black teaching force has declined significantly over the last few decades and continues to decline even in 2003; (b) Black students have not been faring well in public schools since the Brown decision; (c) there seems to be important connections among Black teachers, Black communities, Black students and the Brown decision. Indeed, we are mindful of Hudson and Holmes' (1994) perspective that: ...the loss of African American teachers in public school settings has had a lasting negative impact on all students, particularly African American students and the communities in which they reside...[Although the shrinking African American teacher pool has been attributable to several factors, it is partly a fall-out of how Brown was implemented by White American policy makers, (p. 389) We attempt to understand how the loss of Black teachers in public school contexts may have impacted Black students in schools and how the implementation of Brown may relate to Black teacher attrition, Black student achievement, and Black communities. A DECISION THAT CHANGED EDUCATION AS WE KNEW IT In 1951, the family of Linda Brown complained to the NAACP that their daughter was walking over a mile to her Black, segregated elementary school when a White elementary school was located only a few blocks away. Upon the recommendation and guidance of the NAACP, the family attempted to enroll young Linda Brown into the segregated White elementary school, as did many other Black families in the community. These requests were denied, which resulted in a lawsuit, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It is important to note that the Brown case was not the first attempt at dismantling the injustices inherent in the schooling of Black students. On May 17, 1896, after years of struggle, the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case decision, which ruled against integration but advanced the notion of separate but equal, brought attention to segregation and to integration. In essence, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated sections of buses and schools, for instance, were to be equal. The idea was that these buses and schools would be segregated but the facilities and accommodations would be equal to that of White's. Of course, this ruling was never really earned out or actualized as Blacks continued to receive second-class facilities and accommodations-especially in schools. Arguments in favor of integration in the Brown case pointed to the harmful effect and psychological messages and images that Black students may have endured as they observed better facilities for White students in comparison to the dilapidated buildings in which Black students experienced from day-to-day. …

Beyond the Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation as Litigation

In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools.3 Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality.4 The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of perma-

Brown and the politics of equality

Forty years afterBrown v. Topeka Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision declaring de jure segregated schools unconstitutional, we are still seeking the full implementation of that decree. Most Americans accepted limited implementation ofBrown, and the degree of acceptance is split along racial lines. Racial dialogue has changed. White Americans, who control the desegregation process, develop integration plans to their advantage. School integration was not implemented until after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and peaked in 1972. Today, school integration is declining due to a backlash, changing demographics, and declining resources. However,Brown was a success because it rid the country of legalized state segregation by race in education and in other areas of public policy. The Court could merge the equality standards ofPlessy v. Ferguson and the integration standards ofBrown to give us quality integrated education.

Federalism Vindicated: University Desegregation in South Carolina and Alabama, 1962–1963

By the 1950s, two contrasting strategies of white leadership were emerging in the South: “massive resistance” and “moderation.” Both were equally committed in principle to a defense of segregation, but they employed different tactics: The former trumpeted “defiance,” the later counseled “delay.” The strategists of-“massive resistance,” who for a decade largely dominated politics in Alabama and Mississippi, were convinced that any concession, even a tactical one, would be a dangerous break in the dike of segregation. They believed that defiance could deter the federal government from enforcing the university desegregation decisions and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954; 1955). On the other hand, the strategists of “moderation,” who gained political ascendancy in South Carolina, maneuvered within the law, first to postpone implementation of Brown, and then to determine the minimum amount of desegregation that blacks would accept, which would not at the same time inflame white racists. In effect, they used skillful tactics of delay to “moderate” both white racism and black aspirations. Ultimately, they were more successful in achieving their objectives than the resisters, because they avoided sweeping federal interventions.

A discussion and implementation of Brown's REX simplification algorithm

We discuss a simplification algorithm written by W. S. Brown [Bro69], which gives a normal form algorithm for a class of rational expressions merged with (perhaps complex) exponential expressions. Here we describe the algorithm as revised for implementation in the Maple Symbolic Computation System at the University of Waterloo [Cha83]. We provide some tests and comparisons with alternative systems.