The Limitations of Desegregation Part 1

Brown v. Board of Education resonates deeply throughout American culture and occupies a prominent place within America’s Progressive Narrative. The 1954 case sought to dismantle state-sponsored segregation within public education, yet over fifty years after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, America’s public schools remain more separate and unequal than ever before. Like America’s Narrative, the Court’s decision in Brown espoused democratic ideals that the Justices embraced only in rhetoric. Their ruling, though later nullified by the Court’s decision in Brown II, reflected future promises that they hoped America would eventually live up to.

While it remains unpopular to suggest that Brown was wrongly decided, the years after the decision have exposed it as little more than a feel-good measure aimed at satiating blacks. Rather than granting black Americans educational equality, the decision offered only the appearance of it. Many of Brown’s critics attribute contemporary challenges within public education to the years after the decision and to Brown II, which undermined its de facto implementation. And yet, the tragic flaw—which would forever preclude Brown’s realization—can be traced back to the ideology of the very people who strategized the case. The NAACP’s decision to dismantle Jim Crow inequality by attacking segregation rather than fighting for the equalization of black institutions would slam the doors of educational opportunity shut for many of America’s blacks.

The original strategy taken up by members of the NAACP in the fight against Jim Crow was equalization for the purpose of integration. Their main objective did not reflect what the majority of America’s blacks wanted for themselves or for their children at the time. In Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, Michael Klarman observes that prior to Brown “most southern blacks were more interested in improving black education, reducing police brutality, and securing access to decent jobs, than in desegregating grade schools.” He explicates what he terms, “inverse hierarchies of preference” between blacks and whites; grade school segregation remained at the top of the white supremacist agenda while blacks had vested interests in voting and civil equality. Contrary to what blacks wanted however, the NAACP viewed desegregation as a cheaper, more feasible pursuit. Yet behind the NAACP’s ostensibly utilitarian view of desegregation lay the belief that desegregation was the surest marker of equal citizenship. This belief was characterized by discomfort with racial separatism and suggests that blacks’ proximity to whites would solve the challenges within the black community.

And yet, the social and political milieu of the 1940s and 50s made equalization a feasible goal. America’s battle against fascism during World War II made Jim Crow inequality difficult to justify alongside democratic ideals. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged the U.S. to “refut[e] at home the very theories which we are fighting abroad.” In the mid-1940s, the Cold War placed America upon an international center stage which profoundly impacted the federal government’s behavior. Klarman notes that during this period, “not only had the national government become more committed to civil rights, but it had also developed a greater capacity to enforce that commitment.” This climate fostered the burgeoning liberalization of white racial opinion throughout the south. Across America, there was a growing consensus towards egalitarianism. The opportune moment had arrived for black Americans to launch a full-scale campaign for equalization.

The NAACP made early attempts to fight for equalization. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), a case that challenged the absence of higher educational institutions for blacks, held that states are constitutionally obligated to provide “equal services to blacks within their boundaries.” The courts allotted time for state officials to establish equalized facilities for blacks rather than requiring white universities to admit black students who were denied admission. For many southern whites and state officials, the equalization of black and white facilities seemed more palatable than desegregation. This suggests that a national attack upon unequal institutions would have been more cordially received by members of the status quo.