Before 1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation
throughout much of the nation. That began to change with Brown v.
Board of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the
pernicious "separate but equal" doctrine. In declaring that legally
mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court
played a critical role in helping to dismantle America's own
version of apartheid, Jim Crow.
This new study of Brown--the title for a group of cases drawn
from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District
of Columbia--offers an insightful and original overview designed
expressly for students and general readers. It is concise,
up-to-date, highly readable, and very teachable.
The authors, all recognized authorities on legal history and
civil rights law, do an admirable job of examining the fight for
legal equality in its broad cultural and historical context. They
convincingly show that Brown cannot be understood apart from the
history of caste and exclusion in American society. That history
antedated the very founding of the country and was supported by the
nation's highest institutions, including the Supreme Court whose
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supported the notion of
"separate but equal."
Their book traces the lengthy court litigations, highlighting
the pivotal role of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and including incisive portraits of key players,
including co-plaintiff Oliver Brown, newly appointed Chief Justice
Earl Warren, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood
Marshall, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recognized the crucial
importance of a unanimous court decision and helped produce it. The
authors simply but powerfully narrate the obstacles these
individuals faced and the opportunities they grasped and clearly
show that there was much more at stake than educational rights.
Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste-it
also changed our view of the Court's role in American life.
The dramatic story of the road to and from Brown, despite the
retrenchments of recent years, needs to be heard anew. As we
prepare to commemorate the decision's fiftieth anniversary in May
2004, this book invites readers to walk that road again and
appreciate the lasting importance of what is indisputably a
landmark case.
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