Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement

Introduction: Challenging the Myth of Brown v. Board of Education

The central thesis of Michael Klarman's Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement is that Brown v. Board of Education was a pivotal and massively important moment in American history — but not for the reasons typically given. The common understanding of the ruling is that it ended segregation in schools and helped make America a more equal place. Klarman views this as a superficial interpretation of the subject, closer to myth than reality, and one that needs to be dispelled. He begins by introducing the dominant theme of the book — racism — which he points out had remained "strong in the North in the years after the Civil War."¹ Racism was not merely a regional issue; it had been entrenched in American politics throughout the country and, to a large degree, it was institutionalized.

The Jim Crow Era was proof of the institutionalization of racism. Even at the Supreme Court level, the justices were shown to be more sympathetic toward "the white southerners, 'who are to be coerced out of segregation,' than with blacks, 'who are coerced into it.'"² Polls showed that the decision rendered in Brown was supported by the majority of the American public.³ The Justices were not going against the grain of American sentiment or popular opinion by ending segregation in schools. However, they were concerned that they might be moving too far too fast.

Racism, Jim Crow, and the Political Climate Before Brown

Klarman's point is that had the Court made this decision a decade earlier, there would have been far greater blowback from the public and more resistance. Though slavery had ended, segregation had still been a core feature of American society for nearly a century following the Civil War. Desegregation was sure to lead to upheaval — a destabilization of society as the status quo came under challenge. That was the prevailing feeling throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century. Was the nation ready for it? Were its leaders? Was there any stopping it?

These questions and themes run throughout Klarman's book. He shows that the epic push for validation and equality — stretching from the era of Reconstruction through to the Civil Rights Movement — was like a long, slow-rolling freight train that could not be stopped, one that many American leaders were scrambling to derail or slow down. The Jim Crow system had embedded racial hierarchy so deeply into American institutions that dismantling it required forces far larger than any single court ruling.

World War II and the Transformation of American Race Relations

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education was an attempt by the Justices to get out in front of the issue of segregation — but what they found was that by the time they arrived, the movement was already way ahead of them. By the 1950s, American society had altered so substantially in its attitudes toward race that segregation seemed more important to a minority of people than to the majority. World War II had helped bring about this change.

Americans had fought Germany, a nation portrayed as racist in its drive to promote a white Aryan race and exterminate all others. Americans viewed this ideology as abominable. Hollywood promoted a desegregated vision of the American military with the film The Negro Soldier, produced by Frank Capra. That film alone did much to change the minds of many Americans about the Black population, which prior to that point had primarily been depicted in cinema as clownish and comic. Suddenly, in the 1940s — with a war being waged against racism in Europe — the propaganda machine produced a film that portrayed Black Americans as honorable, decent, virtuous, and civil.⁴

Klarman shows that Brown was not "the origin of the modern civil rights movement" as is often believed, but that instead the contributions Brown made to the movement in the 1960s "were mostly counterintuitive and, occasionally, almost perverse."⁵ In other words, Brown was not organic to the actual movement toward equality in America: that movement had been alive since at least the 1940s. The Supreme Court was late to the party, and when it did arrive it sought to set rules for a gathering already well underway — ending up causing more problems than would have existed had the Court stayed out of the matter entirely.

The book fits well within the broader historiography. Klarman's assessment of race relations in America after World War II aligns with that of Kathleen German, who similarly views the war as having a "transformative impact on American race relations."⁶ Cripps and Culbert agree, arguing in their assessment of race relations in the postwar era that the need for social segregation had lost its ideological grip: Black Americans had become essential to white culture, particularly through music, and the war had helped set racial ideology aside. Racism was not as entrenched as it had been before the war.⁷ Klarman's book underscores these points, suggesting that it was the war — far more than Brown v. Board of Education — that shifted attitudes toward segregation.

Conclusion: Klarman's Legacy and the Limits of Judicial Intervention

Overall, the book provides a great deal of insight into the politics that went on behind the scenes as the Court tried to deal with the issues of segregation, racism, and how to transform a society at the most basic, fundamental level — the school system. Klarman ultimately suggests that the case probably never should have been heard and that the Court was essentially behind the curve. It inserted itself into something it should have left alone and opened up problems that might have resolved themselves without judicial interference. However, that is the argument made about slavery too — that it would have ended on its own as technology advanced and slavery became economically unviable. These are speculative ideas, and it is difficult to judge them by looking back through time and imagining what a better course might have been.

The fact remains that Klarman's book is well-researched and supplies a great deal of insight into what the Justices were thinking when they wrote the decision. Klarman examines the impact of the ruling and shows what its results actually were, providing substantial information along the way. As a reference tool it is an excellent source, and Klarman draws on a great many primary sources to support his argument. The impact of Brown v. Board of Education on the Civil Rights Movement was not necessarily what many believe it to be. The Movement was, in many ways, a response to the Court making the issue of race and segregation far more politically charged than it needed to be. The country might thus have been better served had local government simply been allowed to govern as it saw fit. That may sound problematic — but the Court was making problematic decisions too, decisions that had negative repercussions, confused many, and contributed to violence in the years that followed.

Bibliography

Cripps, Thomas, and David Culbert. "The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White." American Quarterly Vol. 31, No. 5, Special Issue: Film and American Studies (Winter, 1979), pp. 616–640. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

German, Kathleen M. Promises of Citizenship: Film Recruitment of African Americans in World War II. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Klarman, Michael. Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.