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Introduction—The Brown Decision at Age50: Limitations and Emanations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2004

Christopher H. Foreman
Christopher H. Foreman
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Symposium
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PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 2004, pp. 203 - 204
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

The two best-known Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth century differ in many ways but especially in the controversies they bequeathed to the twenty-first. Handed down the day former President Lyndon Johnson died, and bitterly contested ever since, Roe v. Wade (1973) has transformed national politics, especially in the realm of judicial appointments.

But while many yearn passionately for a world without Roe, few would admit to similar feelings about Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). Indeed, the decision “has become a beloved legal and political icon,” (Balkin 2001, 3) lauded even by critics of race-based affirmative action.1

For example, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom (1997, 97–101) see Brown as “a true watershed moment. It began a process of irrevocable change in the South … Brown remains the most important Supreme Court decision in [the twentieth] century.” As Jack M. Balkin (2002, 10) notes: “[Affirmative action opponents believe that such] programs violate the spirit of Brown because they bestow benefits through classifying individuals according to their race.”

And yet this broad-based respect is leavened with bitterness, for mention of Brown today regularly evokes a sense of derailed policy and frustrated opportunity. The subtitles of recent books point to the decision's “quiet reversal” (Orfield et al. 1996), its “broken promise” (Irons 2002), and its “troubled legacy” (Patterson 2001). One contributor to this symposium reiterates here his well-known critique of Brown as a vastly overrated civil rights victory (Rosenberg 1991). Both Roe and Brown were trailblazing civil rights decisions that prompted significant backlash. But the societal expectations concentrated on Brown were naturally much greater, and resistance to its implementation even more pervasively traumatic. To a degree that few would have predicted a half century ago, courts, communities, and civil rights advocates have all largely accommodated to racially segregated schooling, though K-12 education today stands far more politicized, federalized, and scrutinized than it was then.

The fiftieth anniversary of the initial Brown decision—which preceded by one year a companion remedial opinion bearing the famously ill-fated call for school desegregation “with all by deliberate speed,” the so-called Brown II—invites reflection on what the Brown breakthrough meant, and what it might have meant. The five articles in this symposium address a few of the decision's countless “limitations and emanations.”

While Gerald Rosenberg argues that the decision's consequences have been misperceived, Neal Devins challenges conventional wisdom regarding its origins. Indeed, Devins pairs Brown with the Rehnquist Court's United States v. Lopez (1995) to emphasize the primacy of broad social and political forces, above crafty and determined litigation, as a principal driver of those opinions and of judicial behavior more generally. Paul Sracic considers a “lost legacy” of Brown, its assessment of the civic importance of education, a loss stemming importantly from the political predisposition of Justice Lewis F. Powell. Marion Orr and Hanes Walton direct attention to the often painful human consequences of the southern political establishment's fierce rebuff of Brown. Through them we hear what it was like, as two Georgia cities moved at last to comply with the Court's directive, to live day-by-day as an opening wedge for school desegregation. Jennifer Hochschild explores the failure of political science to grapple convincingly with three issues stemming directly from Brown and its aftermath: the alleged failure of desegregation; the gap between elite ideology and constituent preference on both sides of the school voucher issue; and the apparent willingness of policymakers across the country to subject both themselves and a well organized interest (i.e., teachers) to the accountability of standards and testing.

These articles only begin to suggest the richness of Brown as a focus (or, at least, as a timely excuse) for political analysis. This symposium reaches readers of PS as many similar endeavors are under way. One hopes it will help energize public debate, scholarly inquiry, and classroom teaching, especially for those who still know little about, or have not thought much about, what may be the most iconic judicial decision since Marbury v. Madison (1803).

SYMPOSIUM AUTHORS' BIOS

Neil Devins is Goodrich Professor of Law and professor of government, College of William and Mary. Thanks to Chris Foreman for asking me to participate in this symposium and to Stacy Haney for exceptional research assistance. Portions of this essay are drawn from “Congress as Culprit: How Lawmakers Spurred on the Rehnquist Court's Federalism Revolution,” Duke Law Journal 51: 435 (2001) and “The Judicial Role in Equality Decisionmaking,” Neal Devins and Davison M. Douglas, eds., Redefining Equality (1998: 218).

Christopher H. Foreman, Jr. is professor and director of the Social Policy program in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. A non-resident senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, he is the author of The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice (Brookings, 1998) and the editor of The African American Predicament (1999).

Jennifer Hochschild is Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of African and African-American Studies. She is the founding editor of Perspectives on Politics. Her most recent book is The American Dream and the Public Schools, coauthored with Nathan Scovronick (Oxford University Press, 2003.) Her current research examines change and continuity in American racial and ethnic politics through the lenses of skin color hierarchy and multiracialism.

Marion Orr is professor of political science at Brown University. He is the author of Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore (1999) and co-author of The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education (1999). He is a graduate of Savannah High School.

Gerald N. Rosenberg teaches political science and law at the University of Chicago. His interests are in the use of courts to further the goals of the relatively disadvantaged.

Paul Sracic is associate professor of political science at Youngstown State University. He is co-author, with William Binning and Larry Esterly, of The Encyclopedia of American Parties, Campaigns, and Elections (Greenwood 1999). He is currently working on a book entitled Wealth, Education, and Citizenship: The Case of San Antonio v. Rodriguez, which will be published by the University Press of Kansas.

Hanes Walton, Jr. is professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Among his recent books are, Reelection: William Jefferson Clinton as a Native-son Presidential Candidate (2000) and Liberian Politics: The Portrait by African-American Diplomat J. Milton Turner (2002). He is a graduate of Athens High School.

References

Balkin Jack M. 2001 “Brown as Icon.” In What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Decision, ed. Jack M. Balkin. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Irons Peter. 2002 Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Orfield Gary, Susan E. Eaton, and and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. 1996 Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Patterson James T. 2001 Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenberg Gerald N. 1991 The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom Stephan, and Abigail Thernstrom. 1997 American in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar