The way the story is typically told, Brown v. Board of Education was a moment in history when the Supreme Court got it right. When the eight associate justices fell in line behind Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion in the spring of 1954, it marked a powerful refutation of the fallacy that legalized racial segregation could ever satisfy the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the laws.” The ruling legitimized a modern conception of racial equality, premised on an integrationist ideal and the necessity of government supervision to ensure the protection of civil rights.

Yet is this story, repeated time and time again this past week during the fiftieth anniversary of the decision, actually right? In the context of its times, Brown was surely revolutionary. But this evaluation really says more about the sad state of racial affairs in the first half of the twentieth century than about the vision or rightness of the decision. From our viewpoint today, it is impossible to avoid being struck not only by the sad failure of school integration efforts of the past fifty years, but also by the severe limitations of the Brown decision itself.

To put it bluntly, Brown was the product of an insidious delusion being replaced by a beneficial one. The delusion of separate but equal was no longer tenable for liberals in mid-twentieth century America. But Brown replaced this delusion with another: that of mid-century racial liberalism. This exchange was undoubtedly for the better. The rejection of the white supremacist assumptions at the heart of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that established the separate-but-equal principle, was a major step forward in the long march from the legacy of America’s original sin of slavery. But just because Brown was immeasurably better than that which it replaced doesn’t mean that the justices necessarily got it right.

The people who did the most to make Brown possible—the lawyers for the NAACP, the liberal activists, scholars, and press supporting their cause, and the justices who were willing to accept the NAACP argument—tended to agree on certain basic ideas about race and the America system. For one, they believed that America’s racial problems could be solved without major social upheaval. The direct-action protest of the civil rights movement was simply not on their radar screen at the time. For that matter, neither was the frighteningly effective counter movement of Massive Resistance. Furthermore, they believed that the race problem could be solved without the necessity of major social programs or class-based legislation (ideas that were suffocating at the time from the twin nooses of economic prosperity and McCarthyism).

Rather, these racial liberals argued, legal reform was the key. Laws had created the problem in the first place—as historian C. Vann Woodward, the single most influential voice on the history of segregation during this period, told the nation in his widely read 1955 classic, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. So laws were what would remedy the problem. The real problem of segregation, Thurgood Marshall told the Supreme Court during oral arguments, was “the state-imposed part of it”—that is, the segregation laws were the fundamental problem, more than the fact of segregation itself. Assumedly, segregation would disappear once the laws were fixed.

The great irony of the decision was that without these shared delusions, the decision would never have happened. One of the main pressures in favor of the decision was the perception among the justices—and most of liberal America—that the larger trend toward racial equality was well underway, and a desegregation ruling would be simply building upon progressive changes already taking place. It is hard to imagine the justices issuing their decision (surely not unanimously) if they could have envisioned the scope of the backlash it would create. “The Court expected some resistance from the South,” Warren wrote in his memoirs. “But I doubt if any of us expected as much as we got.” It should not be forgotten that after the Brown rulings, with the rise of Massive Resistance, the Supreme Court essentially checked out of the business of school segregation for almost a decade, only returning after the civil rights movement pressured the rest of the government to get involved. Although often lost in the aura that has come to surround Brown, it is important to keep in mind that the justices did not consider themselves social pioneers and they did not intend to get into the business of inspiring social movements.

Even Thurgood Marshall could not foresee the extent of the problem following such a sweeping desegregation ruling. Following the decision, he confidently predicted that schools would be integrated in five years and complete national integration would take place by 1963. After the implementation ruling in 1955—which introduced the often maligned call for desegregation “with all deliberate speed”—Marshall retained much of his optimism. “I think it’s a damned good decision,” he told a friend. As Marshall recalled later in life: “I had thought, we’d all thought, that once we got the Brown case, the thing was going to be over.” Delusions can be empowering, and the right delusions can, under the right conditions, produce needed social reform—as Brown surely was.

The Brown decisions represented a bubble of optimism that was shattered by the reality of powerful southern opposition and presidential indifference (Eisenhower’s unwillingness to stand behind the Court’s decision was a tragic lost opportunity). This was perhaps the most ironic impact of Brown of all: it undercut the foundations of the very assumptions that made it possible. Brown marked the end of an era in which racial change was thought to be possible without a major social upheaval, without anything like what would take place with the civil rights movement. It marked the end of an era in which liberals, both black and white, thought that the power of the law, combined with a dose of clear reasoning, would be sufficient to rid the nation of the plague of racial inequality. It was an inspiring vision, in a way. If only it were not so sadly mistaken.

Related Links

HNN Index: Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years Later