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 if 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 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.
Leland Ware is the Louis L. Redding Professor and Chair for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware. He was a professor of law at St. Louis University School of Law from 1987 to 2000. He was a Trial Attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, in Washington, D.C. He also practiced law with a private firm in Atlanta, Georgia, and with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Professor Ware is a graduate of Fisk University and Boston College Law School.
