Brown at 70: Commitment or Commemoration?

• In Event: Research, Remedy, and Repair . . . Lessons From the 70th Anniversary of Brown

Abstract

The Brown decision is iconic. Hess (2005) interviewed all of the sitting Supreme Court Justices and asked them what cases they believed must be taught to public school teachers. Out of all of the hundreds of cases the Court has decided, the Justices only agreed on two—Marbury v. Madison (1803) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Marbury is the case that established judicial review, i.e., the power to declare a law unconstitutional. It provides the very basis for the Court. But Brown is about the revisioning of America as a fair and just society. We teach it to students at the same moment they are sitting in segregated classrooms. The wholesale misreading of Brown is linked to our failure to understand what Brown was designed to do.
Brown shows up in all of our school history and government textbooks as an “education” decision but legal scholars like Dudziak (2004) argues that Brown was a Cold War decision. She reminds us that the decision came about at a time when the Soviet Union’s propaganda regularly showed the world’s non-aligned nations that America’s form of democracy included legal and overt discrimination against Black and other non-White peoples. They showed pictures of Black people being attacked by dogs and sprayed with high-powered water hoses for attempting to do something as basic as registering to vote or be served at a public lunch counter. As these images circulated throughout the world, the powers that be saw the Brown case (along with the other cases that were bundled with it) as a way to refute the narrative of racism and discrimination. Brown came down as a unanimous decision and represented the triumph of justice and equality. But argued Dudziak, Brown was not an education decision. It was a foreign policy one. Dudziak pointed to the fact that the decision made headlines worldwide. Newspapers in New Delhi, India, Lagos, Nigeria, and Sydney, Australia all ran headlines about Brown as an example of the triumph of democracy. From a critical race theory perspective Derrick Bell (1980) argued that Brown was an example of interest convergence. Interest convergence occurs when those in the minority can align their interests or desires with those in power. In the case of Brown, Black people were seeking quality education and the Whites leading the State Department wanted to counter the Soviet propaganda. Brown became the nexus through which both goals could be achieved. Unfortunately, this symbolism did not translate into actual change. Discrimination continued to be pervasive throughout the US and quality education for Black people remained elusive. This essay addresses three aspects of Brown that reflect its inability to live up to its promises:
Failure to consider the quality of Black schools,
Preserving the job security of Black teachers and administrators, and
Pedagogical strategies that Black communities can use to advance the education of Black students.

Author

• Gloria J. Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin - Madison