Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
The historian Charles Payne has described Brown v. Board of Education as "a milestone in search of something to signify."1Widely hailed as a symbol of Jim Crow's demise, the case is popularly understood to represent America at its best. For many, Brown symbolizes the end of segregation, a national condemnation of racism, a renewed commitment to the ideal of color-blind justice, or some combination of all of these, but Brown is equally affirmed in less celebratory narratives, in which it is seen to articulate a constitutional aspiration against which the injustice of current racial practices can be measured. Unlike the celebratory Brown, which indulges a fantasy of completion or accomplishment, this aspirational Brown marks "an appeal to law to make good on its promises" of equal citizenship and racial democracy, even if that promise remains as yet largely unfulfilled.2
In both versions of Brown, the cultural significance of the case is largely redemptive. According to the legal historian J. Harvie Wilkinson III, "Everyone understands that Brown v. Board of Education helped deliver the Negro from over three centuries of legal bondage. But Brown acted to emancipate the white South and the Supreme Court as well."3Continuing the redemptive language of emancipation and deliverance, Wilkinson's celebratory account chronicles how "Brown lifted from the Court the burden of history."4In contrast, Jack Balkin presents the aspirational view of Brown as an ideal against which current racial inequalities may be judged. Among legal practitioners, he notes, one does not argue "for" or "against" Brown; rather, equal protection disputes tend to involve rival interpretations of the case's underlying principle, with all sides claiming to be Brown's rightful heir.5That Brown figures so centrally in such irreconcilable historical narratives testifies to the case's iconic status. This much is implicit in Payne's quip about Brown as milestone: setting aside questions of the Court's ability to produce social change, the case is asked to carry a cultural load it could not possibly sustain.6We are invited to reflect, then, upon what social, political and ideological needs are revealed by this state of affairs.
If Brown is "a milestone looking for something to...