Thwarting the First Civil Rights Revolution
The Court's late-nineteenth-century decisions on race
The following essay for our Race and the Supreme Court program was written by Robert J. Cottrol, the Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology at the George Washington University. He is the co-author of Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution (University Press of Kansas, 2003). He is currently working on a comparative legal history contrasting the role of law in constructing systems of slavery and racial hierarchy in the Americas.
Chances are if you went to law school sometime in the last half-century you absorbed a certain narrative about race and the Supreme Court. The Court was the hero of that narrative. Its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education cut through the Gordian knot that had long stifled racial progress in the nation. The decision, the first act of the new Warren Court, gave strength and heart to the postwar Civil Rights movement and ultimately courage to the political branches. It helped precipitate a civil rights revolution, one in which the law went from being an active abetter of American-style apartheid, Jim Crow, to being the chief vehicle for attacking racial discrimination. The Court’s school desegregation
