This essay collection seeks to capture the experiences of children who lived through the school desegregation era. The editors, Mildred Wigfall Robinson and Richard J. Bonnie, identify themselves as members of the “Brown generation,” which they define as those who were in public schools at some point between 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and the mid-1960s. The desegregation struggle “affected us profoundly,” they explain, and Brown stands as a “powerfully symbolic decision [that] seemed to us to capture the best hopes of an era” (2). They decided to explore the experiences of other members of the Brown generation, sending out surveys to people who were born between 1936 and 1954 and asking for their recollections of Brown and how the decision changed their educational experience. The results of the survey are summarized in an appendix, but the bulk of the book consists of forty short essays in which respondents describe their personal experiences and reflect upon Brown's significance.

What gives this project a distinctive place in the extensive literatures on Brown and school desegregation is the way in which Bonnie and Robinson targeted their survey: They sent it to law professors. Herein lies perhaps the most revealing aspects of the essay collection, although largely unintended (and unacknowledged) by the editors. In their personal recollections of Brown, most of the law professors who contributed tend to mirror legal scholarship on Brown, vacillating between acknowledging the minimal impact the decision itself had on their lives while also insisting on the decision's transcendent importance.

The essays are a mixed bag. They are frequently digressive, at times frustratingly so. Some contributors only briefly describe their public school experiences before turning to their own academic careers, where Brown reappears as an inspiration for various career choices. Some write more about their views of current race relations than about their childhood experiences. Yet the narratives also can be insightful in a distinctly personalized and unpredictable way. The best provide powerful personal vignettes that help to fill out the historical record of Brown and its aftermath. One contributor who was a freshman at the all-white University of Georgia in 1954, for example, recalls being surprised at favorable initial reception to Brown on campus (59). Several African American contributors write about their own resistance to desegregation.

“We liked our present school world—secure, sane, affirming, safe, nurturing, and, of course, all black,” writes Charles E. Day (97). Tracking as a tool of de facto segregation within “desegregated” schools is a common theme, as are black-white tensions within the newly desegregated schools. (Davison M. Douglas recounts being “razor bladed” in a fight with black students [104]). The costs of desegregation on black teachers and administrators also emerges in several essays.

In describing their personal experiences, the majority of contributors reiterate a basic point: very little changed after Brown. Many who were in school at the time of Brown simply cannot recall the decision as an event in their lives. School desegregation in the decade following Brown was minimal, and even in nominally desegregated schools there was often little interracial interaction. Outside the border states, most of the school desegregation described in this collection did not take place until the late 1960s. The dominant storyline that emerges from the personal accounts (and in the survey results) is that the decision itself had relatively little effect on the lives of children at the time or in the decade following.

Nonetheless, when given the opportunity to generalize about the impact of Brown, most contributors come to the exact opposite conclusion. Brown mattered, they insist over and over again. “Hearts changed as a result of the Court's pronouncement,” assert the editors in the introduction (6), a claim they embrace as the title of the book.

These apparently contradictory conclusions on Brown's impact largely can be attributed to definitional inconsistencies—the same tendency that has made recent scholarly debates on Brown's impact so heated even when the substantive differences among competing interpretations often end up being rather small. So when contributors assert that the decision had an identifiable impact on attitudes and actions, what they often mean is that school desegregation had such an impact. If one supports a claim for Brown's efficacy by citing the school desegregation that took place in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then there really is no debate, as revisionist scholars (such as Gerald Rosenberg and Michael Klarman) readily concede that congressional action was effective. But once Brown becomes synonymous with school desegregation itself, then the question of the decision's impact dissolves into a tautology. What is left is a different—and ultimately more important—question, over the value of racially integrated education. On this question, the diverse contributors to this collection speak with one voice, powerfully and often eloquently describing the costs of segregation and the value of integration to their school experiences.