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

In historical memory and scholarship, Brown vs. Board of Education looms large as one of the central legal challenges to political and social inequality in the United States. Reflecting on this vast literature in 2004, just fifty years after the landmark case, Waldo E. Martin issued a call to his fellow historians to consider the social and culture history of the monumental campaign.^* In many ways, Ben Keppel’s Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation is a response to this charge. In a history of the years following the US Supreme Court’s decision, or what the author calls the Age of Brown, Keppel examines how Americans responded to cultural changes that were products of calls for desegregation. At the center of this history are three “cultural first responders”: Harvard-trained psychiatrist Robert Coles, comedian Bill Cosby, and television producer Joan Ganz Cooney. In tandem, these individuals used the tools of their trades to help answer one essential question: “what does the phrase ‘public education’ require of the rest of us?” (13)

The first chapter characterizes the Age of Brown as a historical reenactment of the Reconstruction era. Although the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments represented an opening for African Americans to lay claim to citizenship after emancipation, the American polity had failed to fully embrace its new citizens. It would take the work of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass and others to transform a culture that had relied on racial inequality for centuries. Keppel argues that by the 1950s, public education had become a site of this struggle, or a twentieth-century Civil War. The second chapter examines the trajectory of public schooling in the United States during the 1960s, when Americans from all stripes wrestled with the cultural transformations Brown imbued in American schooling. Using Septima Clark and Marcus Foster as key examples, Keppel suggests that the pedagogical practices and school-centered approaches of Clark and Foster illustrate the cultural impact of Brown. These “new abolitionists,” which included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists and their work with Freedom Schools, reshaped meanings of public education. Clark approached learning as a reciprocal process at the Highlander Folk School, while Foster worked with students and parents to lobby Sacramento legislators for increased school funding.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Keppel takes the reader on a journey outside of the schools and into the world of social scientists and popular cultural figures. Each of these “cultural first responders” used their platform to push the country to reconsider the purpose of public education at a moment when federal programs like the War on Poverty pushed for greater citizen participation. Robert Coles, the author of the Children of Crisis series, used his fieldwork in Mississippi to support efforts to bring the Head Start Project to the state. Cosby, who saw himself as a teacher, created the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids cartoon to raise racial awareness and to provide positive images for black children during the 1970s, when representations of African Americans were largely limited to news coverage of social unrest and protest. Cosby sought to provide an alternative to these depictions and the children’s shows that portrayed white children’s lives as normative. And of course, he brought the same agenda to his primetime show, the Cosby Show in 1984. Like Cosby, Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of the Children’s Television Workshop and a producer for the popular children’s show Sesame Street, used her platform to transform the meaning of public education. Established in 1970 and set in New York City, the show represented a form of educational television that tried to imagine the world as it could be. It allowed American children the opportunity to integrate virtually without [End Page 286...