Brown Vs Board and The Mystification of Race - Charles M Payne

"The Whole United States Is Southern!": Brown v.
Board and the Mystification of Race

Author(s): Charles M. Payne
Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jun., 2004), pp. 83-91
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"The Whole United States Is
Southern!": Brown v. Board and the
Mystification of Race
Charles M. Payne
We are not only culturally confused, our confusion makes it difficult for us even to
imagine our confusion.
-Lawrence Goodwyn
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

-George Orwell
Brown v. Board ofEducation (1954) is becoming a milestone in search of something

to signify. It would be going too far to think of the case as an early example of a
media event, as more hype than substance, but even with a half century of perspec-
tive, it is difficult to say with confidence just why Brown has seemed to matter so
much. School desegregation on a broad scale does not seem to be feasible public pol-
icy. In 1962, after eight years of experience with Brown, one writer observed that at
the then-current pace, Deep South schools could be completely desegregated in just a
bit over seven thousand years. Some of the progress made toward desegregation in
the 1960s and 1970s has eroded. When desegregation does occur, the social and aca-
demic outcomes are not so uniformly positive as was once hoped. The oft-repeated
idea that Brown inspired more civil rights activism is plausible, but no one has made
more than an anecdotal case for it. Indeed, a better case can be made for Smith v. All-
wright, the 1944 Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary. In 1940, the
percentage of all southern blacks who were registered to vote was estimated at below
5 percent. In 1947 the percent registered jumped to 12 percent, by 1952 to 20 per-
cent. The increase seems directly attributable to the black voter registration drives
that occurred across the South following Smith. The decision energized the modern
civil rights movement and ended black political exclusion. As for Brown, in perhaps
the most important revisionist critique of the decision, the legal scholar Michael J.
Klarman argued that strong links exist between the decision and the mobilization of
white southern resistance to racial change.'
Charles M. Payne is Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of African American studies, history, and sociology at Duke
University. He thanks Thavolia Glymph, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Kevin Gaines for comments on an earlier draft.
Readers may contact Payne at <[email protected]>.
I On the pace of desegregation, see James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York, 1962), 3. On school
The Journal of American History June 2004 83
84 The Journal of American History June 2004
If the legacy of Brown seems clouded now, its significance seem

many audiences in 1954. Time magazine called it the mos
Court decision of all time, excepting only the Dred Scott
Defender saw in the decision the beginning of the end of a
more extreme defenders of segregation saw virtually the end of
does it mean that so many commentators, coming at it from so m
tions, got it so wrong? What does it mean that supporters and
tion alike overestimated the impact of Brown? What does tha
of understanding of the racial system? Clearly, part of the m
widespread tendency to overestimate the power of the law t
underestimate the degree of racial intransigence outside the
tions, though, may reflect a larger pattern. What the initial misr
us is that by midcentury, national discourse about race had b
fused; the nature of racial oppression had been effectively m
mystification process was the reduction of the systemic chara
to something called "segregation." The historian John W. Ce
term is "profoundly ambiguous and self-contradictory" and co
of ambiguity and contradiction was skillfully and very delibe
sion has been one of segregation's greatest strengths and achie
A discussion of the nature of that confusion could start with th
guson decision, white supremacy's legal fig leaf. Even as whit
institutionalized, it was developing a rhetoric that hid its natu
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argumen

assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamp
with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of a
the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that
it.3
So, in the familiar theme, the problem is that there is something wrong with black
people; they are just overly sensitive. Still, the Court was also willing to grant that
part of the problem was the social prejudices of white people:
resegregation, see Gary Orfield, "Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," July 17,
2001, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University <http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/deseg/
separate_schools01.php> (March 3, 2004). Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). On registration, see David J.
Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, 1978), 6-7. The
voluminous literature that locates the "beginnings" of the modern civil rights movement before Brown includes
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994); Greta de Jong, A Different
Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002); Charles M. Payne,
I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995); and
Michael J. Klarman, "How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis," Journal ofAmerican History, 81
(June 1994), 81-118.
2 Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for
Equality (New York, 1976), 709; "Editorial Excerpts from the Nation's Press on Segregation Ruling," New York
Times, May 18, 1954, p. 19. For a discussion of segregationist reaction that avoids stereotypes, see Cook, Segrega-
tionists. John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the
American South (New York, 1982), 2-3.
3 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 551 (1896).
Brown and the Mystification of Race 85
The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislatio
and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced com
mingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are
meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities,
mutual appreciation of each other's merits and a voluntary consent of individual
... Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions
based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in acce
tuating the difficulties of the present situation.4
The race problem, then, has nothing to do with power or privilege or exp
tion-all of which the law might do something about-it is all a question
white and black people feel about each other. In his famous dissent from Pless
tice John Marshall Harlan-as irony would have it, a former slaveholder-reje
the idea that the separation of the races was merely an expression of individu
preferences, seeing it instead as a "brand of servitude and degradation," one e
in a system of racial oppression:
In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite a
pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case .... T
present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions
more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, b
will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defe
the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view whe
they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.5
Harlan was only stating the obvious truth; segregation was the result of sys
racial domination and would only facilitate more brutal aggressions, more tra
sive state laws. He lost on the decision, of course, but he also lost the larger b
determine how the racial system in the South was to be framed. It became in
ingly common for white southern spokespersons to do what the Court did: t
rate the act of segregation from the systematic oppression of which it was bu
by framing the racial system in a language of "separation," "customs," "our
life," and "social equality." That language constructed race in interpersonal, no
tural, terms and put the most acceptable public face on political disenfranchis
economic exploitation, racial terrorism, and personal degradation. The languag
implied a system that worked to everyone's benefit, "enabling each group to
to its highest potential, at its own pace, in its own way, maintaining its dist
cultural values."6
According to Cell, when exactly the language and ideology of segregation
together remains obscure, but some important points of confluence are clear
late nineteenth century, most southern white leaders were committed to the s
nation of blacks. But they were also very sensible of the need not to repeat t
takes of 1865-1867; naked attempts at subordination through the Black Cod
resulted in the trauma of Reconstruction. The phrase "separate but equal" was
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 562, 559.
6 Cell, Highest Stage of White Supremacy, 2.
African American students pose outside a segregated elementary

Hurlock, Maryland. White southern spokespersons maintained
institutions worked to everyone's benefit, attempting to put a po
on an oppressive and exploitative social and political system.
Library of Congress, Prints 6& Photographs Division, Visual Mater
the NAACP Records, LC-USZ62-126579.
used by southern spokespersons-editors of regional news

early as the 1880s; it seems to have been used most when no
involved. It was not, however, the language of the most fana
seldom shows up in the early twentieth-century speeches of
tician Ben Tillman, Gov. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi,
mons of North Carolina. Extreme racists preferred exclusio
facilities for blacks, no facilities at all. Segregation was the
particularly used by that group of merchants, industrialist
themselves a movement for the New South. They worked coo
ern capital and came to wield disproportionate influence on
political interests. Yet for the New South coalition to remain
Somehow, in the face of mounting lynching statistics and increa
tests from blacks, Northern opinion had to be mollified. It ha
that the "best elements" of the South had the Negro Question
emerging segregationist ideology performed its function admir
presidential addresses and Supreme Court decisions, it form
national reunion of whites.
By the late 1920s, Cell estimates, euphemism had become the preferred langu
the white South. By midcentury, the southern paradigm had become deeply em
ded in national thinking about race.7
The historian David Brion Davis has argued that the Confederacy won the C
War ideologically. That is, southern interests disproportionately shaped the way
nation came to think about the issues embedded in the war. Race came to be und
stood through what Davis calls a Confederate-dominated paradigm: Confed
interests and northern apologists were able to shape a national memory that m
mized the role of slavery in shaping the nation. In addition, "the reconciliatio
North and South required a national repudiation of Reconstruction as 'a disast
mistake'; a wide-ranging white acceptance of 'Negro inferiority' and of w
supremacy in the South; and a distorted view of slavery as an unfortunate but b
institution that was damaging for whites morally but helped civilize and Christ
'African savages."'8
To this, we might add some corollaries and slight changes of emphasis. First,
Davis calls the Confederate paradigm has always been most comfortable attrib
racial inequality to the characteristics of black people-if not their outright infe
ity, something at least problematic about their attributes. Thus discussions ab
poverty, which is usually a racialized topic, become attacks on or defenses of the
acter of the poor. Or, echoing Plessy, for many majority-group college student
key problem of race on their campus is the oversensitivity of minority students
ond, southern elites have always preferred discussions about race in which they
presented as the aggrieved party, whether that means bearing the burden of having
civilize and support blacks in the nineteenth century or having to put up with r
discrimination in the twentieth. The states' rights argument is another versio
this. When he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in
temporarily blocking two black students from entering, Alabama governor G
Wallace was trying to frame desegregation as the trampling of his rights by fe
authority, not as his doing anything to black people. Last, apologists for the sou
way of life have always preferred to frame race relations in interpersonal, not s
tural, terms. Endless anecdotes have been told about how close blacks and whit
were under the old system, how much they looked out for one another. When s
erners spoke of "good" race relations under Jim Crow, they almost invariably m
an absence of conflict between the races, conveniently overlooking the fact t
power relations were so skewed that conflict was extremely unlikely. When con
porary college students reduce race to who eats lunch with whom instead of, say
gets access to higher education, they are proceeding from the same paradigm
privileges the interpersonal over the structural. That few of them could even con
of a structural way to pose the problem is further proof of Confederate victory.
7 Ibid., chap. 7, esp. 182-83. See also Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythm
(New York, 1970), esp. chap. 4.
8 David Brion Davis, "Free at Last: The Enduring Legacy of the South's Civil War Victory," New York
Aug. 26, 2001, sec. 4, p. 1.
It is, of course, not difficult to find national leaders interpret

through a rigidly nonstructural paradigm. Dwight D. Eisenhower
framed his opposition in terms that could have come directly from P
the delicacy of human relationships. "I do not believe that preju
cumb to compulsion. Consequently, I believe that Federal law
States . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long t
ment not to be preposterous, one has to conceive of race relation
violence, exploitation, or the deprivation of effective citizenship
ple. If we upset white people, we are going backward. Later, Eis
pointed out to Chief Justice Earl Warren that white southerners "
To take an example from the sixties, it is now largely forgotten
Bush began his political career "emphatically" in opposition t
1964 Civil Rights Act and was particularly critical of the public
component in the legislation. Echoing Eisenhower, he maintained
was ineffective. What counted in the quest for civil rights, he ex
in a person's heart.10
Brown, then, was being interpreted in an ideological contex
Americans almost reflexively understood race in nonstructural ter
as an obvious watershed in part because it seemed to address the
important issue of how blacks and whites were going to interact
a mid-1950s viewpoint, it was reasonable to believe that having c
together would change the role of race in people's lives (althoug
proven the matter more complicated). As they first looked at B
southern white elites were trapped in fifty years of their own self-s
of race. Over time, they began to understand, in the historian J
pino's useful phrase, that black aspiration could be strategica
Accumulated social privilege-class-segregated residential patt
afforded middle- and upper-class whites significant protection f
When that did not work, district lines could be gerrymandered
tracked, and segregationist academies could be established. Perhap
southern leadership could learn to use the fear of school desegreg
the country to blunt pressures for desegregation in the South. T
white supremacy had to be relinquished-unrestrained racist viol
degradation of blacks, their complete exclusion from formal cit
did not necessarily call for fundamental shifts in power and privilege
the elite levels. The Byrds of Virginia, the Lotts of Mississippi, S
South Carolina, even George Wallace in Alabama-were able to re
In the process, they were able to pull the nation in their directio
logical center of gravity to the right, in part through their skillful
9 Dwight D. Eisenhower has been widely criticized for his attitude toward Brown. Less
immediately after the ruling, he voiced his hope that the District of Columbia could be
tions to comply and that it could create a model for others to follow. James T. Patterson
cation: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York, 2001), 81.
'0 Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative
1994 (Baton Rouge, 1996), xi.
racial anxieties and racism of the rest of the nation. One suspects that if some
told southern elites in the late 1950s that in exchange for concessions of civil
to blacks, they would be able to eliminate the idea of liberalism as a legitima
of political discourse, at least some of them would have considered the barga
worth it."
African American attitudes toward racial separation have always been comp
southern racial system, in fact, allowed for a great deal of personal contact
racial lines, perhaps more so than in other parts of the country; it just had to
tact on terms defined by white people. Southern cities, for example, tradition
lower indices of housing segregation than their northern counterparts. Jokesters
quick to point out that the numerous light-skinned blacks were living proo
plenty of integration was happening after dark. Part of the social scientist G
Myrdal's optimism about American race relations was based on his finding tha
southern whites were most concerned with preventing social equality-which
context can be taken to mean unregulated cross-racial contact-blacks were p
ily concerned with access to jobs, housing, and schooling and least concerne
anything like social inequality. The first black students to desegregate school
frequently chided for their disloyalty to black schools. One 1955 poll found o
percent of southern blacks in agreement with Brown. In his study of black w
class protests over segregated public transportation in World War II Birmin
Alabama, the historian Robin D. G. Kelley concluded that segregation itself
the key issue:
Sitting with whites, for most black riders, was never a critical issue: rather, African
Americans wanted more space for themselves, they wanted to receive equitable
treatment, they wanted to be personally treated with respect and dignity, the
wanted to be heard and possibly understood, they wanted to get to work on tim
and above all, they wanted to exercise power over institutions that controlled the
or on which they were dependent.
In short, after World War II blacks were virtually all opposed to the stigma t
involved in segregation and to segregation insofar as it was used as a tool-o
very important tool-to prevent access to a decent life. But that did not alway
late into any deep commitment to integration as an end in itself.'12
Within the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement o
ored People (NAACP), however, one could find a very strict focus on ending
tion, so much so that W. E. B. Du Bois accused the leaders of myopia. The e
wrote during the 1930s calling on blacks to continue to build strong race-base
" Joseph Hardin Crespino, "Strategic Accommodation: Civil Rights Opponents in Mississippi
Impact on American Racial Politics, 1953-1972" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). On south
cians and the ideological shift to the right, see Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, xii-xv.
12 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (2 vols., Ne
1944), I, 61. For the 1955 poll, see Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, xxvi. Robin D. G. Kelley, R
Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 75.
tutions even as they continued to assail segregation might h

unexceptional in the sense that they described how most black
anyway. Yet Du Bois's essays led to his being drummed out o
had helped create. Like Du Bois, the NAACP's membership oft
atic side to a strict focus on defeating segregation. In the yea
the historian Adam Fairclough contends, "NAACP officials had
their members that integration would be more effective than
ing a better education for their children." When some expressed f
black colleges, Walter White, the organization's executive se
blacks needed to "give up the little kingdoms" that had devel
When others pointed out that integration often led black chil
alienated, one NAACP lawyer responded that if integration led
drop out, that would have to be borne since there were casual
When it was suggested that black teachers and principals mi
unemployed in desegregated systems, the leadership responded
price of change. Robert Carter, one of the NAACP lawyers wh
that the legal team "really had the feeling that segregation its
a symptom of the deeper evil of racism. ... The box we were in
and most of the nation saw it that way, too."13
If that was true of most of the nation, it is not clear that it w
nation's black people, either before or after the Brown decisi
Brown among blacks ranged widely. While the NAACP lawy
claimed that segregated schools could be stamped out in f
expected it to take a lot more lawsuits-and the writer Ralph
as opening a "wonderful world of possibilities" for childr
reporter was clearly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm in th
Washington, D.C., the day after the Court delivered the opi
story "Capital's Negroes Slow in Reacting." According to the w
that was not unusual; the mood in many black communities
One black columnist said of Memphis that "there was no gene
hullabaloo on Beale Street over the Supreme Court's admissio
the public schools is wrong. Beale Streeters are sorta skeptica
cheers yet.""4
One way in which Brown really was a milestone is that it m
a certain way of thinking about race. Later, that way of thin
Americans to believe that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and
13 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Vie

Decade ofIts First Century (New York, 1968), chap. 17; Adam Fairclough, Better Day
1890-2000 (New York, 2001); Robert Carter quoted in Kluger, Simple Justice, 534
tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) originally planned to bring a
the Wichita schools. It had to be switched to Topeka because of opposition from
board of the NAACP. See Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACPs Legal Strategy against S
(Chapel Hill, 1987), 139.
14 Thurgood Marshall and Ralph Ellison quoted in Patterson, Brown v. Board o
Times, May 18, 1954, p. 18. For the mood in black communities and the black c
phis, see Kluger, Simple Justice, 710.
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"The Whole United States Is Southern!": Brown v.

Board and the Mystification of Race

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Brown v. Board ofEducation (1954) is becoming a milestone in search of something

The Journal of American History June 2004 83

If the legacy of Brown seems clouded now, its significance seem

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argumen

African American students pose outside a segregated elementary

used by southern spokespersons-editors of regional news

It is, of course, not difficult to find national leaders interpret

tutions even as they continued to assail segregation might h

13 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Vie

v..r...: . . .::i:::?.....: :..: : .i :.o: :.. ; , :,:::?

. ... ...... ... . ... . . .. .......... ... . . .. .... .......

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