Customer Reviews

Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History)

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Having grown up during the 1950's I wanted to familiarize myself in regard to civil rights, in particular as it applied to the historic 1954 Supreme Court ruling "Brown vs. the Board of Education." I found that President Eisenhower was not in favor of getting involved in civil rights for African Americans. He is quoted as saying that appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice to the Supreme Court was the "biggest damn fool mistake I ever made." Roy Wilkins of the NAACP is quoted as saying if Eisenhower fought World War II as he did for civil rights, "We'd all be speaking German today." I was disappointed in Eisenhower's approach to civil rights for African Americans. Ten years after the 1954 Brown ruling, things hadn't changed regarding civil rights. The heroes in the book are those workers who fought in the trenches for civil rights, particularly during the 1960's. Most of them are not remembered, but their contributions remain, nonetheless. President Johnson's greatest legacy remains getting the government behind racial justice. The 1954 Brown ruling hasn't had the effect it may have desired regarding schools, but by the 20th anniversary of Brown, America had been brought kicking and screaming forward for civil rights for African Americans. The book lists a number of cases and studies with their results and I have concluded we don't really know whether integration has improved test scores in schools. Having been a teacher myself for 32 years I do know that children are not bigoted as were some children and adults I knew as a kid. Kids often reflect their parents behavior. This is a book that is definitely worthy of your time. I did find one error in the book. The author said Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were executed in July of 1953 when actually it was on June 19, 1953.

Much more needs to be written about the Brown v. Board of Education era. Patterson indeed does a good service of describing the "trouble legacy" of Brown. For while school integregation and the end to seperate but equal laws were a major revolution of sorts in this country, Brown left unresolved significant questions and problems concerning the education of African descended students and other minorities. For example, while Brown focused on legal and structural changes in public education, which led to the desegregation of schools, it did not address issues of integrating school curriculum and preparing teachers and school officials for a multicultural transformation of schooling. It simply assumed that the solution to racism in this society was to provide a way for Blacks to assimilate in the larger White society instead of empowering themselves to respect and build their own culture and institutions. While Patterson deals with the legal aspects Brown, he too avoids or overlooks the pedagogical and cultural issues that went unaddressed in Brown. Thus, Patterson's work doesn't add significantly anything new to the history of Brown that is not dealt with in J. Harvie Wilkson's From Brown to Bakke or Kluger's Simple Justice.

Patterson succeeds in writing a very different book than Kruger's unequaled "Simple Justice." While Simple Justice told the story of how Brown v. Board of Education came to be, Paterson asks whether Brown should have been.

After giving a brief history of Brown (covering, in summary fashion, much of the ground covered by Kruger), Patterson examines the aftermath of Brown. The question Patterson addresses throughout the book is whether Brown marked a step forward in civil rights.

Patterson successfully debunks the argument that Brown was a step backwards. As he says, anyone who thinks that the country was better off before Brown had better buy a two way ticket if he wants to go back in time, because he will want to turn right around and come back. Before Brown, most black children were educated in tarpaper shacks, by grossly underpaid teachers, with no supplies, and even less respect.

Did Brown solve all problems? Of course not. As Patterson notes, what Brown does do is prove that there are limits to the power of the courts to accomplish social change. However, the Supreme Court did set an unequivocal moral tone, which set the stage for the civil rights movement, which (building on the constitutional foundation built by Brown) changed the world we all live in.

Has racism ended? No. But no one should expect any Supreme Court decision (or even a series of decisions spanning less than 25 years) to undo the racial history of this country which had taken 400 years to build. The real shame is that beginning in the late 70's, the courts, Congress, and the President have all worked to reverse the moral tone set in Brown. Unfortunately, they have succeeded all too well. But one can not fairly blame that on the Supreme Court's decision in Brown.

A thought provoking book which should be read by anyone who is interested in the history of race relations in the second half of the 20th Century.

This is really a must read book for anyone interested in the issues surround desegregation and the efforts by Thurgood Marshall and others to end such practices in America's schools. It also is a very vivid reminder that courts and lawsuits can only go so far, and in the end it is people and their institutions that must be changed as well. Did Brown achieve all that it was hoped that it would - the author argues that it didn't, but that it did lay the foundation for tremendous change in racial relations during the last century. The author also helps to place the decision of Brown in context with other legal and political events that help the reader understand what was the source of resistence in various parts of the US to school desegregation and subsequent busing endeavors. Well worth reading and keeping on your shelves.

James T. Patterson's Brown v. Board of Education is an exceedingly well researched historical work on the pivotal cases faced on all judicial levels in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s regarding segregation in our nation's schools. Professor Patterson masterfully writes on not just the legal implications of the landmark decision(s) in Brown but also in regard to their social impact. He puts into a greater racial and societal context not only the meaning of Brown but also the strategies of Thurgood Marshall and his associates in deciding to bring before the Court when many other challenges to Jim Crow could have been argued with much legal and moral merit.

Patterson tirelessly, but interestingly, cites case after case and puts each before the reader in the context of a broader societal consequence. He dispassionately argues the merit and challenges of desegregation as society was changing at a precipitous rate with "white flight" from our urban centers to affluence and the ability to "avoid" integration with the availability of private schools obviously not covered by Brown or the 14th Amendment. A theme seemingly in most, if not all, of Patterson's writings on the American 20th Century is the effect of expectations of the populous. Indeed his wonderful contribution to the Oxford Series of United States History is entitled "Grand Expectations". It is interesting how he weaves that theme into this much more specific narrative. "This is another way of reiterating an essential truth about Brown: so many larger postwar forces- rising expectations and restlessness among blacks; slowly changing white attitudes about racial segregation; the Cold War, which left Jim Crow America vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy when it claimed to lead the Free World - were impelling the nation townard liberalization of its racial practices.

This is a great book and is part of the Oxford Series of Pivotal Moments in American History. To state the utter obvious, the reader should be aware that this "moment" is still very much ongoing and, as such, this book is much broader, out of intellectual necessity, than one, or really two, Supreme Court decisions.

James Patterson adds an excellent addition to the Pivotal moments in American history series with Brown v. Board of Education. This book explores the results of Brown and how it shaped civil rights in the post Brown era. While of course focusing primarily on schools, Patterson also takes a look at how Brown emboldened groups like the NAACP, caused the rise of the more militant civil rights group by the failure to implement Brown and shows how Brown changed the views of those who went through it. The book does not just end with Brown II but goes on to look at the busing cases and the efforts of several legislatures to implement plans to uphold school desegregation. It examines the tactics of extremist white southerners to keep schools segregated and posits some interesting ideas about how Brown changed urbanization and may (at least in the south) have encouraged a second wave of white migration to the suburbs. Overall though it is a thorough analysis of the post actions that the Brown decision derived.

My one complaint about this book and the reason for the four stars is that it says very little about the actual arguments of the case. While providing a background of the key players in the case there is little information about the oral and written arguments presented to the Supreme Court. That being said given that the series tries to give the most amount of information in the shortest number of pages possible I would bump it to 4.5 stars.

Book arrived in great condition and arrived quickly. I recommend this book to anyone interested in race or the Brown v. Board of Education Case.

Before delving into this book, I suggest that readers pick up and thoroughly digest Richard Kluger's Simple Justice, an epochal book on this topic. Kluger's book is absolutely brillant and extremely detailed with insights on Chief Justice Vinson and Chief Justice Warren's wrangling the Court for a unamimous decision, among many other subjects, including many of the cases that led up to Brown v. Board.

This is by far one of the best books I have read on such a reat case in our nations history. The story alone of Brown vs. The Board of Education is a very intersting read, but Patterson backs the story with other facts and stories that go along with the case. For anyone who need to know anyhting about this case, be it for law school r high school, or just for fun, I highly recomend this great book.