Remembering Massive Resistance to School Desegregation

The historian Charles Payne has described Brown v. Board of Education as a milestone in search of something to signify. Widely 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. © 2013 the American Society for Legal History, Inc.