Brown v. Board invaluable in racial justice fight, law professor says

BY LISA TREI

The debate over the promise and impact of Brown v. Board of Education continued April 16 as scholars discussed how the landmark legislation changed -- and failed to change -- American society.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been possible without the Brown case because it established the principle that separation based on a notion of black inferiority is unequal, Alexander said. Photo: L.A. Cicero

Michelle Alexander, a Stanford associate law professor and director of the Law School's Civil Rights Clinic, challenged Derrick Bell's claim asserted April 15 (see related article) that African Americans would have been better off had Brown been decided differently.

Darling-Hammond discusses student test scores while panel moderator Sally Dickson, associate vice provost for faculty development, looks on. Photo: L.A. Cicero

"I'm extremely wary of claims that the quest for social justice was inevitable," she said. "Fifty years is a very short period of time. The notion that we'd be much further along if the [legal] principle in Brown v. Board had never been established seems highly suspect." However, Alexander agreed that Brown was a failure from an educational equity perspective. "Our schools today remain highly racially segregated," she said.

According to Alexander, Brown was an invaluable contribution to the struggle for racial justice. The NAACP filed the suit not simply to end segregation in schools but to unravel the system of racial apartheid in this country. "It unquestionably helped to further that goal," she said. The civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been possible without the Brown case, Alexander argued, because it established the principle that separation based on a notion of black inferiority is inherently unequal.

Despite the case's broad and lasting significance, James Jackson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, and Stanford education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond listed grim statistics demonstrating that discrimination persists for African Americans.

Jackson, director of the Program for Research on Black Americans, said despite the hope promised by Brown, the United States is becoming more unequal. In studies on unemployment, per capita income, infant mortality, home ownership and life expectancy, African Americans fare worse than whites, he said.

Darling-Hammond noted that average reading scores for black and Hispanic 13-year-olds are comparable to white 9-year-olds, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test known as the "Nation's Report Card." Overall, minority students attend older, poorer and more crowded schools and are taught by less qualified teachers, Darling-Hammond said.

Aside from such stark statistics, Jackson noted, blacks share a "certain pessimism" about the future based on continuing discrimination experienced in everyday life. What Jackson described as "micro-insults" -- for example, when a stranger crosses the street to avoid someone -- are often the most bothersome to a person's psyche. "Nearly a quarter of the African American population say this happens on a more than weekly basis," he said.

Americans want to believe in the myth of meritocracy upheld in Brown, Jackson said: "Americans love messages of hope. Brown was a message of hope." Americans also love messages of self-blame and self-responsibility -- that people should take responsibility for themselves. They believe "one has to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps, which of course is very difficult if one doesn't have any boots," Jackson said.

Brown and the Cold War

While most of the panelists focused on the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, Mary Dudziak, professor of law and history at the University of Southern California Law School, talked about the case in the context of the Cold War. Dudziak is the author of Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.
In the postwar era, the United States came to be viewed as the leader of the free world. "The U.S. government held up its system as a model for the rest of the world," Dudziak said. "But this created a problem. U.S. allies, as well as critics, asked how can the U.S. system be the model for the rest of the world when segregation exists? [This] was widely seen to be America's Achilles heel."

By 1949, the issue of race in America had become a leading theme of anti-U.S. Soviet propaganda. "This wasn't a small problem," Dudziak said. "American diplomats thought it was a grave and serious problem."

Ultimately, the United States took the problem -- the story of race in America -- and turned it into a narrative about the supremacy of democracy as a system of government. The story emphasized how far the United States had come in a century -- from a nation that supported slavery to one that rejected race-based segregation in schools.

"Brown itself fulfilled a promise that the U.S. already had made to the world, and it did something that American diplomats thought was simply essential for U.S. foreign relations," Dudziak said. "If Brown didn't fully change the nature of school assignment, the case was powerfully effective in cleansing the image of American democracy in the eyes of the world."