Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation by Ben Keppel (review)

Amid scholarly reassessments of the limitations of the civil rights period, Ben Keppel’s Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation centers the importance of establishing a new cultural context within which an integrated society could take seed. Using historical reenactment as an analytical frame, Keppel highlights the significance of three individuals who worked in distinct realms to create the architecture for a reimagined world—psychiatrist Robert Coles, comedian Bill Cosby, and television producer Joan Ganz Cooney. While these “cultural ‘first responders’” are not always on the front lines of change movements, they create opportunities from which one can imagine and embody those changes (p. 2).

Not unlike the period following the Civil War, the era after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision saw Americans faced with the task of developing “‘new habits of citizenship’” that would allow them to be able to work together in this newly defined context (p. 6). Coles, through his study of black children in integrated educational settings; Cosby, through humanizing the black experience without explicitly engaging with race; and Cooney, through the advent of an educational space that at once provided early academic support and presented an idealized vision of a multiracial community, all reinforced the possibilities within the fullest implementation of Brown. During this Second Reconstruction, Keppel argues, schools emerged as the location where people could “come together in an effort to create a shared and integrated vision of one’s relationship to a larger world” (pp. 62–63).

Robert Coles “assigned to himself the teaching task of helping a public...to look inward” (p. 89). Using drawings by young people to uncover their feelings with regard to race, power, and authority, and leveraging his status as a physician, Coles emerged as an “independent expert witness” who was able to reveal the experiences of the black poor to a broader cross section of Americans (p. 90).

Bill Cosby, who Keppel acknowledges has been revealed to represent a more troubling legacy during the last few years, is characterized by the author as a “cultural politician” who used the medium of television to present alternative representations of black people to white Americans (p. 94). Cosby projected a new “us” to white Americans who, in turn, “‘gave themselves credit for ignoring blackness’” (p. 99). Through his comedy, the creation of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and, later, The Cosby Show, he presented alternative realities of the black experience, without explicitly engaging the viewer in conversations of blackness.

Joan Ganz Cooney, through the creation of Sesame Street, constructed an idealized urban neighborhood where a “disadvantaged child would finally also belong and have a secure home in the American television neighborhood” (p. 132). The physical boundaries of Sesame Street presented a “middle ground where children, whether they were from the city or the suburbs, and no matter what the wealth or ethnicity of their family, could virtually gather” to witness (and participate in) the world anew (pp. 147–48).

Throughout Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture, Keppel makes a convincing case for the importance of social messengers in establishing the architecture for the world not yet achieved and the intrinsic power of these imagined spaces. To this end, Coles, Cosby, and Cooney, through their distinct endeavors, committed to “representing in the present the attitudes and attributes of an America that was still very much off in the future” (p. 170).