The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity
The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity
JAMES C. COBB
Series: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
Copyright Date: 2005
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 102
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46ncp1
Search for reviews of this book
Book Info
The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity
Book Description:

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was a watershed event in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. The recent fiftieth anniversary of Brown prompted a surge of tributes: books, television and radio specials, conferences, and speeches. At the same time, says James C. Cobb, it revealed a growing trend of dismissiveness and negativity toward Brown and other accomplishments of the civil rights movement. Writing as both a lauded historian and a white southerner from the last generation to grow up under southern apartheid, Cobb responds to what he sees as distortions of Brown's legacy and their implied disservice to those whom it inspired and empowered. Cobb begins by looking at how our historical understanding of segregation has evolved since the Brown decision. In particular, he targets the tenacious misconception that racial discrimination was at odds with economic modernization--and so would have faded out, on its own, under market pressures. He then looks at the argument that Brown energized white resistance more than it fomented civil rights progress. This position overstates the pace and extent of racial change in the South prior to Brown, Cobb says, while it understates Brown's role in catalyzing and legitimizing subsequent black protest. Finally, Cobb suggests that the Brown decree and the civil rights movement accomplished not only more than certain critics have acknowledged but also more than the hard statistics of black progress can reveal. The destruction of Jim Crow, with its "denial of belonging," allowed African Americans to embrace their identity as southerners in ways that freed them to explore links between their southernness and their blackness. This is an important and timely reminder of "what the Brown court and the activists who took the spirit of its ruling into the streets were up against, both historically and contemporaneously."

eISBN: 978-0-8203-4292-4
Subjects: History
You do not have access to this book on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.
Log in to your personal account or through your institution.
Table of Contents
Export Selected Citations Export to NoodleTools Export to RefWorks Export to EasyBib Export a RIS file (For EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, Zotero, Mendeley...) Export a Text file (For BibTex)
Select / Unselect all
  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. ix-xii)
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-6)

    When I learned that I would be delivering the Lamar Lectures in 2004, I thought immediately of the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Shortly after that, of course, it occurred to me that I was probably not the only historian who had made this connection and that doubtless a slew of books and anthologies were already in the works and slated for publication in 2004. This meant that by the time my lectures were in print, the scholarly community and the reading public would have been awash in discussions of this topic for at least...

  5. 1 Stranger Than We Thought: Shifting Perspectives on Jim Crow’s Career
    1 Stranger Than We Thought: Shifting Perspectives on Jim Crow’s Career (pp. 7-30)

    Writing in 1958, with the outcome of the Little Rock school integration crisis still hanging in the balance and the reenergized post–World War II crusade to recruit new industry to the South going great guns, Oberlin College sociologists George E. Simpson and Milton E. Yinger suggested that segregation could never “survive” in an “industrial society.” The current unpleasantness down in Arkansas notwithstanding, “once a society has taken the road of industrialization,” they advised, “a whole series of changes begin to take place that undermine the foundation of the segregation system.” Two years later economist William H. Nicholls agreed that...

  6. 2 Down on Brown: Revisionist Critics and the History That Might Have Been
    2 Down on Brown: Revisionist Critics and the History That Might Have Been (pp. 31-55)

    As I surveyed the predictable flood of media assessments of the fifty-year legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I was struck by what seemed to be the overwhelmingly negative tone of these appraisals. In this case, as in so many others, historical and contemporary opinions show remarkable convergence. Brown has never been without its critics, of course, particularly on the right, but in 1994 University of Virginia law professor Michael Klarman emerged as the point man in a naysaying liberal revisionist assault on the perception that the Brown decision enabled and energized the civil rights movement. In...

  7. 3 Brown and Belonging: African Americans and the Recovery of Southern Black Identity
    3 Brown and Belonging: African Americans and the Recovery of Southern Black Identity (pp. 56-76)

    A decade before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidated racial segregation in the public schools, writer Sterling Brown began his contribution to the controversial volume What the Negro Wants by citing a recently published history of Georgia whose white author took great comfort in the fact that the “Anglo-Saxon . . . race makes up nearly one hundred percent of the population of the South.” Brown attributed the apparent invisibility of more than one-third of the state’s inhabitants to the propensity of whites to see “only the people that count.” In the stage play that was the...

  8. Notes
    Notes (pp. 77-88)
  9. Index
    Index (pp. 89-94)
  10. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 95-95)
University of Georgia Press logo