Brown v. Board of Education and the Politics That Created a Constitutional Icon

Abstract

Few scholars or educators of law or politics would dispute the contention of the authors of a recent retrospective on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling was “the most important decision of the 20th century.”1 Indeed, Brown can be said to have achieved canonical status within the legal academy, as evidenced by the fact that no other ruling has been regarded by so many individuals as, to borrow one of many similar encomiums, “the greatest moral triumph constitutional law ha[s] ever produced.”2 The 88 percent approval rating that Brown received in a Gallup opinion poll taken forty years after the decision was rendered supports the view that the ruling is “largely sacred” not only among academics but “in American political culture” as well.3 The contrast between that supermajority figure and the 62 percent of Americans that approved of Brown in 1961 (the last time Gallup sought that information until 1994) reveals that the ruling’s reputation developed over time.4 In fact, Brown generated enormous controversy for a number of years after it was rendered. Even journalists and scholars who favored desegregation conceded the charge of southern politicians that the justices had circumvented traditional legal constraints in declaring segregation unconstitutional.5 Gerald Rosenberg observes that the conventional explanation for Brown’s eventual elevation to canonical or iconic status is that the decision and related desegregation rulings “played a crucial role in producing both changes in civil rights and an active civil rights movement.”6 Yet, pervasive and current as the belief may be within the academy that Brown inspired activists who then prompted Congress to pass important civil rights legislation, the wider public is unlikely to be familiar with the written opinions that accompany even well-publicized rulings,