Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform

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Oxford University Press, 2004 - Education - 230 pages
When the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, many civil rights advocates believed that the decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, would become the Holy Grail of racial justice. Fifty years later, despite its legal irrelevance and the racially separate and educationally ineffective state of public schooling for most black children, Brown is still viewed by many as the perfect precedent.

Here, Derrick Bell shatters the shining image of this celebrated ruling. He notes that, despite the onerous burdens of segregation, many black schools functioned well and racial bigotry had not rendered blacks a damaged race. He maintains that, given what we now know about the pervasive nature of racism, the Court should have determined instead to rigorously enforce the "equal" component of the "separate but equal" standard. Racial policy, Bell maintains, is made through silent covenants--unspoken convergences of interest and involuntary sacrifices of rights--that ensure that policies conform to priorities set by policy-makers. Blacks and whites are the fortuitous winners or losers in these unspoken agreements. The experience with Brown, Bell urges, should teach us that meaningful progress in the quest for racial justice requires more than the assertion of harms. Strategies must recognize and utilize the interest-convergence factors that strongly influence racial policy decisions.

In Silent Covenants, Bell condenses more than four decades of thought and action into a powerful and eye-opening book.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
1 Plessys Long Shadow
11
2 Browns Half Light
14
An Alternative Scenario
20
4 The RacialSacrifice Covenants
29
5 The InterestConvergence Covenants
49
6 Brown as an Anticommunist Decision
59
7 The Role of Fortuity in Racial PolicyMaking
69
10 The School Desegregation Era
94
11 The End of the Brown Era
114
An Assessment
130
13 Affirmative Action and Racial Fortuity in Action
138
14 Searching for Effective Schools in the PostBrown Era
160
15 Moving Beyond Racial Fortuity
180
Conclusion
194
Notes
203

8 Racisms Economic Foundation
77
9 School Litigation in the Nineteenth Century
87

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About the author (2004)

Derrick Bell is Visiting Professor of Law at New York University Law School. He was for 15 years a member of the Harvard Law School faculty. As an NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer, he handled and supervised hundreds of school desegregation cases during the 1960s. He is the author of several books including Race, Racism and American Law, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth, Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, and And We Are Not Saved. He lives in New York City.

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