‘Brown vs. Board’s’ grim history

‘Jim Crow’s Children’

The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision

Peter H. Irons

Viking: 400 pp., $29.95

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Looking back after all these tumultuous years, it is poignant to remember the exhilarating promise of that bright spring day in 1954 when the Supreme Court upended 58 years of American constitutional law and unanimously declared that for American blacks separate was not, after all, equal.

The great burden that had weighed upon the daily lives of blacks as the legacy of slavery and that had oppressed the consciences of sympathetic whites was lifted. The pledge of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution for “the equal protection of the laws” was fulfilled. The Union’s victory in the Civil War was vindicated.

No one thought it would be easy, but some thought it could be done. The court’s command in Brown vs. Board of Education to end segregation by law in American public schools, rendered on May 17, 1954, would set this race-divided nation on the path that would lead, at long last, to unity.

It was not to be. There have been many improvements in the lives of American blacks since then. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which among other things forbade discrimination in public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1975, which broke the Jim Crow system of political control by whites in the South, erected new strong shields against invidious ill treatment of American blacks.

But the thorough integration of black and white children in the same public schools was not achieved. How the Brown decision came about, and why its promise was not kept, is the subject of Peter Irons’ limpid if melancholic “Jim Crow’s Children.”

A professor of political science and director of the Earl Warren Civil Rights Project at UC San Diego, Irons does not equivocate. His heroes in the struggle for school integration are Chief Justice Warren, Justice William Brennan, a handful of Southern federal judges including J. Waties Waring of South Carolina, and especially Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer and later Supreme Court justice. And then there are the black children and their families who sought only their constitutional rights and a better education.

The author of “A People’s History of the Supreme Court” and “Brennan vs. Rehnquist: The Battle for the Constitution,” Irons is a calm and steady writer. His villains are not so much people, though he describes well those who, in the streets, statehouses, Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court itself, sought to oppose or delay integration, but the very manifestations of Jim Crow itself, rooted in the post-Civil War South but present almost everywhere in America.

He takes his readers easily through the relevant court decisions and brings to life the lawyers who argued them and the judges who made them. His focus is naturally on those who had the last word, the jurists of the Supreme Court, with all their strengths and limitations. To get the unanimity he mightily desired in Brown, Warren had to defer to Justice Felix Frankfurter’s desire for a second round of hearings to establish ways and means to achieve school desegregation. In the court’s second decision, Frankfurter inserted the phrase “with all deliberate speed.” It was, Irons believes, an invitation to endless litigation and delay.

Not altogether endless. After issuing commands in the late 1960s and early 1970s to proceed forthwith, the court, no doubt reflecting the temper of the country, pulled back. On July 25, 1974, the court, by a 5-to-4 decision, with appointees of President Nixon providing the makeweight, ruled that Detroit’s suburban schools did not have to be joined with the city’s to give black children of the inner city an integrated education. That marked the beginning of the end of the drive for racially integrated schools.

Irons recognizes the political realities of the current state of the nation. But he closes his book with a quotation from Marshall’s dissent in the Detroit case (Milliken vs. Bradley): “In the short run, it may seem to be the easiest course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities -- one white, the other black -- but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.”