Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity

2. Down on Brown: Revisionist Critics and the History That Might Have Been

2 Down on Brown Revisionist Critics and the History That Might Have Been As I surveyed the predictable flood of media assessments of the fifty-year legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I was struck by what seemed to be the overwhelmingly negative tone of these appraisals. In this case, as in so many others, historical and contemporary opinions show remarkable convergence. Brown has never been without its critics, of course, particularly on the right, but in 1994 University of Virginia law professor Michael Klarman emerged as the point man in a naysaying liberal revisionist assault on the perception that the Brown decision enabled and energized the civil rights movement. In fact, Klarman has argued that instead of furthering the cause of racial equality, the ruling may actually have set it back, at least temporarily. By provoking a virulent white “backlash,” Klarman suggests, the Brown decree actually aborted an ongoing “indigenous Southern racial transformation” sparked by the accelerating urbanization and industrialization and intensifying demands of African Americans for racial justice that had marked the first decade after World War II.1 Klarman has not been content simply with charging that Brown effectively reversed “what had been steady black progress in the region.” He has also argued that its primary contribution to the cause of civil rights actually came not in inspiring the protests of the ensuing decade but in angering the southern whites whose ugly and violent response to these protests eventually generated massive national public pressure for federal action against racial discrimination . In one way or another, Klarman’s arguments have been 31 anticipated, adopted, or affirmed by several other scholarly critics of the Brown decision, including prominent legal scholars Gerald Rosenberg, Mark Tushnet, Charles Ogletree, and Derrick Bell, who contends that the Brown ruling actually produced “advances greater for whites than for blacks.” I have heard these arguments many times, and my studied, scholarly response to them remains, “Say what?”2 Surely, no one who has studied the history of the South in the twentieth century could argue that the region remained unchanged in the generation before the Brown decision. World War II was a culminating event in what had been a roughly thirty-year “turning period ” in southern life, punctuated by numerous shocks, stresses, and strains, including the invasion of the boll weevil, the outmigration of an estimated 1.5 million southern blacks between 1915 and 1940, the economic upheaval of the Great Depression, and the ensuing agricultural and demographic restructuring of the New Deal. During World War II the hypocrisy of sending U.S. troops to prevent all of Europe from falling under the control of a racist dictator while tolerating a racially repressive and thoroughly undemocratic regional subculture at home had simply proved too blatant to ignore. “To a nation fighting totalitarianism abroad,” Morton Sosna observed, “Jim Crow became an embarrassment.” Meanwhile, not only had NAACP membership increased ninefold during the war, but black veterans had returned home demanding a total and immediate end to Jim Crow.3 Still, Klarman’s contention that “World War II’s contribution to progressive racial change cannot be overstated” is, in fact, an overstatement itself, especially when the short-term white reaction to the war’s potentially disruptive influence is considered. Former Mississippi congressman Frank Smith observed that “[m]ore young men came home from World War II with a sense of purpose than from any other American venture,” but it did not necessarily follow that they all returned with the same sense of purpose. For every 32 Chapter 2 Medgar Evers who came back hell-bent for justice, there was a Byron De La Beckwith, the former marine who killed him, or a Robert “Tut” Patterson, the one-time paratrooper who founded the segregationist Citizen’s Council. As it had after World War I, racial violence, along with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the appearance of various other hate groups, reflected white fears that returning black servicemen might actually try to exercise some of the rights they had just risked their lives to defend.4 It was certainly true that returning white veterans demanding better government and more and better jobs played a key role in a number of “G.I. revolts” that ousted long-ensconced political rings in state and local governments across the South. The emergent goodgovernment sorts definitely cringed at the racist rabble-rousing of...