IT IS TEMPTING IN RETROSPECT TO CONSIDER BROWN V. BOARD OF Education of Topeka as all-but-inevitable outgrowth of a post-1945 popular consensus that racial segregation violated tenets of what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed. According to this view, beleaguered white South's most cherished institutions crumbled in face of a national commitment to racial equality, an idea, as Senator Everett M. Dirksen later put it, whose time has Yet there is something too simple about this account, especially stark contrasts between North and South and between dedication to racial equality and commitment to segregation. In what follows, I want to focus on three interrelated aspects of history of Brown decision: national rather than merely regional commitment to, or at least acceptance of, segregation circa 1954; universalist paradigm for thinking about race that had emerged after World War II, of which Brown is a prime example; and challenge to universalism by end of 1960s, seeds of which can also be detected in Brown. (1) The complex relationships among Brown, equality, and intellectual understandings of race reveal tangled and still unresolved dilemmas in American thought about racial and cultural groups. It is easy to forget that at time of Brown, segregated schools were mandated in seventeen states and Washington, D.C., and permitted in four more states, including of course Kansas, where Brown case originated. Sixteen states explicitly forbade school segregation, while laws of eleven others made no mention of matter. (2) Thus, when Supreme Court emphasized national purview of its decision by selecting Brown case to head list of four cases under review, it was not simply soft-pedalling its indictment of South. Much of nation lived with segregation of one sort or another. I do not want to suggest that southern race relations in early 1950s were no worse than elsewhere, but neither is it correct to assume that white South's recalcitrance--as shown in Southern Manifesto, massive resistance, and mobs of white parents hurling rhetorical vitriol at young black children entering formerly all-white schools--was historically inevitable. The PBS documentary Hoxie: The First Stand poignantly suggests that things might have been, indeed occasionally were, otherwise. In summer of 1955, five-man, all-white school board of Hoxie, Arkansas, decided without prompting to comply with Brown decision. One member recalled that it was the law of land and we thought it was right thing to do. However, events in Hoxie also prefigured in depressing fashion what was to come. Moral and constitutional principles were rendered nugatory by lack of support from political leaders of state (i.e., Governor Orval E. Faubus) or nation; there were no state or regional (white) organizations that backed school board's brave initiative; and outside agitators such as segregationist politician Jim Johnson moved in to bolster efforts of local demagogues who were organizing resistance to school desegregation in small Arkansas town. Though school desegregation held, Hoxie was in most respects a prelude to Little Rock rather than a new departure for white South. (3) The political and moral vacuum in wake of Brown should come as no surprise. Recent studies emphasize that national commitment to racial equality was always intertwined with Cold War considerations and thus highly opportunistic. (4) A segregated America was not exactly most compelling image to present to newly emerging nations of Third World (even though American foreign policy never placed decolonization at or near top of its concerns). Despite considerations of foreign policy, though, Congress was anything but interested in challenging segregation in South before or after Brown decision. …