The burden of Brown: thirty years of school desegregation. - book reviews

National Review, July 13, 1984 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

THE BURDEN of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, Tenn.; $24.95), by Raymond Walters, is a carefully researched, delicately (but firmly) argued, and stylishly written study intended to give "an interesting account of desegregation" in the four school districts consolidated on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, plus Washington, D.C., which was ordered the same day by the Court (Bolling v. Sharpe) to desegregate its schools. The bulk of the book consists of Walters's fascinating history of the total failure of four of these attempts and the partial failure of one of them. Inevitably, Walters is led by his findings to scrutinize the judicial wisdom of the Court in its efforts to tie knots in the sociological Laocoon it had created--less by its conclusion than by its argument, or perhaps one should say its speculative and dubious ramblings pursuant to that argument--in 1954, as well as the subsequent role of the judiciary as a "standing constitutional convention."

"My own point of view," Walters tells us in this introduction, "is so different from the prevailing wisdom that it seems advisable to state it candidly at the outset and then present the evidence with a minimum of didactic intrusions." Yet, his findings support the revised conclusions of the sociologist James S. Coleman, author of the Coleman Report of 1966, for which he acquired the sobriquet, "The Scholar Who Inspired Busing":

Contrary to the expectations of those who favored desegregation, the quality of public education available to blacks is generally no better than it was in 1954. The situation has improved in Prince Edward County [Va.] and has stayed about the same in Summerton [S.C.], but in Washington and Wilmington [New Castle County], black education retrogressed during the 1960s and 1970s. There was also widespread white flight, with almost all the whites in Summerton, Washington, and Wilmington either moving elsewhere or transferring their children to private schools. It has been more difficult to flee from county-wide school districts, but more than half the white students in Prince Edward County are enrolled in a private academy, while the proportion of whites attending private schools in New Castle County has increased to one-third.

The chief result of desegregation as practiced for thirty years by the courts has therefore been resegregation: even in Washington--once called the "showcase of desegregation," but where in retrospect it is apparent that what looked for a while to be "progress" was no more than a transition period "between the time when the first blacks enrolled in mixed schools and the last whites moved out"--let alone in Prince Edward County, where "determined white people have largely nullified three decades of judicial effort to reconstruct their schools." And in Topeka, Linda Brown Smith, who in the 1970s deplored busing but has subsequently had her consciousness raised, has joined a lawsuit that reopens the question of the meaning of "desegregation" by arguing that regardless of where children live they should attend an integrated school.

"More compulsion," Walters concludes: that is what the courts must exercise if they are to enforce the burden, not actually of Brown, but of Green v. New Kent County (1968), in which the Supreme Court took it upon itself to fly in the face not only of its own decision of 14 years earlier, but of Congress, which had just passed the Civil Rights Act forbidding (in language, it was said, that even a judge should be able to understand) precisely the descrimination the Court was not merely endorsing but mandating. "We are under a Constitution," Chief Justice Charles evans Hughes said, "but the Constitution is what the judges say it is"; to which Walters adds: "nothing illustrates this point better than the fact that the Constitution, without being relevantly amended, first permitted racial discrimination in the schools to separate the races, then prohibited such discrimination, and now sometimes requires discrimination in order to achieve racial balance." Despite the reluctance of Congress and even the Reagan Administration to curb the courts, Walters suggests that "It is hard to see how decisions that lack intellectual respectability and popular support can be maintained indefinitely."