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The case, Brown v. Board of Education, seemed to be "as pivotal a moment as any," according to Patterson. But in his recently published book, "Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy," (left) the Bancroft Prize-winning historian looks back at race relations and school desegregation efforts since the court decision and concludes, "It turned out not to be very pivotal at all."
Patterson, who has taught at Brown for nearly three decades, readily recognizes the progress made in civil rights during the last half century. Those discouraged by the current state of race relations "think not much has changed… [but] we forget how bad things were under that Jim Crow system," he said. In 1954 segregation was mandated in 17 states and allowed in four more and the District of Columbia — effectively separating whites from blacks in public facilities and leaving some 11.5 million public school children in segregated classrooms. Internationally, the United States had a reputation as a racist nation.
Brown v. Board of Education raised the hopes of civil rights supporters, offering the promise of educational equality to millions of African-American children — but there were obstacles along the way. The court put no deadline on desegregation, instructing the states to implement their decision "with all deliberate speed." As a result, a decade after the decision was issued, only one percent of black students attended integrated schools.
The pace picked up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and the Title VI provision that denied federal funding to schools that remained segregated by state law. While that "was a small club you could hit people with," according to Patterson, even liberals were reluctant to swing it; its unintended victims were sure to be the students attending the affected schools.
It was also a club never wielded at northern states, where schools were segregated by custom rather than statute, Patterson noted. "The North got a free ride — and was very sanctimonious about it," he said.
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n the years since the Civil Rights Act, U.S. courts have grown more conservative, Patterson observed. Among other things, the 1939 study in which African-American children seemed to prefer and identify more strongly with white dolls rather than brown ones — cited in a footnote by the justices in the Brown decision as evidence that school segregation was causing psychological harm to southern black children — has come under fire. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and others have challenged "the idea you have to go to schools with whites to do well," finding it "patronizing."While fights over school busing and the "white flight" it spawned seem to have passed, demographic shifts since the 1980s have unbalanced schools again. Schools in the South and West are now the most desegregated; those in the Northeast and in large, heavily black urban centers are the most segregated. Meanwhile, standardized test scores indicate the gaps in educational achievement between the races are growing wider — leaving black as well as white liberals with rising doubts that "the enormous hopes invested in this decision" will come to fruition, said Patterson.
"There’s a sense of alarm and sadness about this among those who’ve been supportive of desegregation — and I share this," he said. While he’d like to see "strong local leadership and community involvement" produce better race relations and racially balanced, successful schools, court intervention is "desirable in many cases." He supports efforts to equalize resources from one school district to the next, but concedes that isn’t a magic bullet.
"There are no easy answers," said Patterson.
And what of the pre-Brown notion that schools could be separate and equal?
"Separate and equal is certainly possible in terms of resources and quality of education, but a country that accepts or encourages racially separate schools will encourage the separation of races at other levels," said Patterson. "I think that’s not a healthy development."