Abstract
Brown v. Board of Education emerged from a constellation of assumptions about race and law, the contours of which have yet to be fully reconstructed. We are familiar with the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and their allies to attack the belief, infamously espoused in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation imposed no necessary badge of inferiority on African Americans. Familiar, too, is the growing recognition by the middle of the twentieth century of the importance of education to modem American society, a factor Chief Justice Earl Warren highlighted in the Brown opinion. And recently scholars have drawn attention to the critical role of Cold War foreign policy in creating pressure for civil rights reform. But there was another issue that permeated the intellectual landscape during the early post-World War II period in which Brown was born that has largely been overlooked in the scholarship: whether law even had the power to affect the racial prejudice that motivated the practices and customs of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Without a commitment to the belief that the guiding hand of the law had the capacity to weaken racial animosity, much of the nascent civil rights project threatened to dissolve. A critical factor in the emergence of civil rights as a viable national issue was the work of activists, lawyers, and scholars who pressed upon the nation their faith in the efficacy of civil rights reform.
Recommended Citation
Schmidt, Christopher W.
(2008)
""Freedom Comes Only From the Law": The Debate over Law's Capacity and the Making of Brown v. Board ofEducation,"
Utah Law Review: Vol. 2008:
No.
4, Article 5.
Available at:
https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol2008/iss4/5