Brown Vs Board and The Mystification of Race - Charles M Payne
Brown Vs Board and The Mystification of Race - Charles M Payne
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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
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
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84 The Journal of American History June 2004
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).
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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.
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86 The Journal of American History June 2004
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Brown and the Mystification of Race 87
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.
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88 The Journal of American History June 2004
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.
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Brown and the Mystification of Race 89
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.
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90 The Journal of American History June 2004
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Brown and the Mystification of Race 91
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