The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in
1954 has long been heralded as a landmark in the progress of civil
rights in the United States. But as the forces opposing affirmative
action and supporting resegregation have gained ground in recent
years, its legacy has been questioned. Some wonder whether the
decision did more harm than good, by fomenting a backlash, or
whether the desegregation it brought about might not have been
accomplished anyway through legislation. Others worry about the
racial paternalism they see as inherent in the desegregation
project and reflected in the Brown ruling.
Choosing Equality includes contributions that give voice to
these concerns, yet it provides a strong challenge to this
revisionist interpretation. It does so in a unique way, by
positioning the issues in the overall national context but focusing
on them in the experience of one state, Delaware, that stands as a
microcosm of the larger conflict. The State's significance to Brown
lies in its contributing two of the five cases that were
consolidated in the Court's review of the litigation. But
Delaware's own history registered the racial conflict at the heart
of the American dilemma: a slave state that fought on the side of
the North in the Civil War, it experienced black migration to its
cities and the ghettoization that followed but also had black
farmers working as sharecroppers next to whites in its southern
section. Moreover, while it saw massive resistance to
desegregation, it also was the site of one of the largest and most
peaceful metropolitan desegregation efforts.
This volume offers not only academic analyses of Delaware's
experience of Brown, set in the broader framework of the debate
over its significance at the national level, but also the personal
voices of many of the leading participants, from judges and lawyers
down to community activists and the students who lived through this
important era of the civil rights movement and saw how it changed
their future by giving them hope.
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