Heeding Black Voices: The Court, Brown, and Challenges in Building a Multiracial Democracy
![handle is hein.journals/upitt66 and id is 67 raw text is: HEEDING BLACK VOICES: THE COURT, BROWN, AND
CHALLENGES IN BUILDING A MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY
Joe R. Feagin
In 1967, thirteen years after the first Brown v. Board of Education
decision, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. voiced great frustration with the lack of
progress in societal desegregation: [e]very civil rights law is still
substantially more dishonored than honored. School desegregation is still 90
percent unimplemented across the land .... Legislation that is evaded,
substantially nullified and unenforced is a mockery of the law.' Dr. King
articulated the views of most African-Americans, views stemming from
centuries of painful experiences with systemic racism in U.S. society. Thus,
for more than a decade after Brown, white officials in southern districts defied
the mandates and implications of Supreme Court and lower federal court
rulings and, therefore, the black perspective on U.S. racism and racial change.
Indeed, by 1960-1961 only a miniscule 0.16 percent of black children were in
school with white children in the South.2
Today, a majority of white Americans still reject most of the black
perspective on racial discrimination and desegregation in the United States,
thereby openly mocking the Brown decision and the civil rights laws passed
since the 1960s. Not even half the country's black children today are in
schools that are majority white, and there are increasingly fewer white
children in public schools in our large central cities.3 Even racially integrated
schools are, as a rule, internally divided by ability tracking, a second-
generation segregation of white and black children.4 In spite of white support
* Ella C. McFadden Professor, Texas A & M University. The author wishes to thank Professor
Roy Brooks for helpful comments and Danielle Dirks for research assistance.
1. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., WHERE Do WE Go FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY? 11
(1967).
2. PHILIP A. KLINKNER & ROGERS M. SMITH, THE UNSTEADY MARCH: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF
RACIAL EQUALITY IN AMERICA 245 (1999).
3. See PETER IRONS, JIM CROW'S CHILDREN: THE BROKEN PROMISE OF THEBROWNDECISION 338
(2002).
4. The problem of second-generation segregation was well articulated in the 1970s and 1980s by
Jennifer Hochschild. See JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD, THE NEW AMERICAN DILEMMA: LIBERAL
DEMOCRACY AND SCHOOL DESEGREGATION 31 (1984); JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD, TtIRTY YEARS AFTER
BROwN 5 (1985).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/upitt66&div=17&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Heeding Black Voices: The Court, Brown, and Challenges in Building a Multiracial Democracy
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