Brown V. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution

by Cottrol, Robert J.; D Amond, Raymond T.; Ware, Leland B.; Cottrol, Robert J.; Diamond, Raymond T.

• ISBN13: 9780700612888
• ISBN10: 0700612882
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

Before 1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation throughout much of the nation. That began to change with "Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the pernicious "separate but equal" doctrine. In declaring that legally mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court Played a critical role in helping to dismantle America's own version of apartheid, Jim Crow. This new study of "Brown--the title for a group of cases drawn from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia--offers an insightful and original overview designed expressly for students and general readers. It is concise, up-to-date, highly readable, and very teachable. The authors, all recognized authorities on legal history and civil rights law, do an admirable job of examining the fight for legal equality in its broad cultural and historical context. They convincingly show that "Brown cannot be understood apart from the history of caste and exclusion in American society. That history antedated the very foundin

Author Biography

Leland B. Ware is the Louis L. Redding Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.

Table of Contents

Editors' Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
1. "A People Apart"	11	(23)
2. "Seperate and Unequal": An American Apartheid at the Dawn of an American Century	34	(15)
3. The NAACP in the Interwar Years: The Struggle Renewed	49	(28)
4. From Scientific Racism to Uneasy Egalitarianism: One Nation's Troubled Odyssey	77	(24)
5. Setting the Stage	101	(18)
6. Arguing the Case	119	(32)
7. Anatomy of a Decision	151	(32)
8. Brown II: "All Deliberate Speed"	183	(25)
9. From Target to Icon: Brown and the Role of Courts in American Life	208	(26)
Epilogue. Brown and Race: The Divided Legacy	234	(11)
Chronology	245	(6)
Bibliographical Essay	251	(10)
Bibliography	261	(16)
Index	277