"The Whole United States IsSouthern!": Brown v. Board2S\A theMystification of Race

Charles M. Payne

We are not onty cutturatty confused, our confusion makes it difficult for us even toimagine our confusion.

— L̂awrence Goodwyn

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

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is becoming a milestone in search of somethingto signify. It would be going too far to think of the case as an early example of amedia 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 somuch. Schoot 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 atthe then-current pace. Deep South schools could be completely desegregated in just abit over seven thousand years. Some of the progress made toward desegregation inthe 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-repeatedidea that Brown inspired more civil rights activism is plausible, but no one has mademore 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, thepercentage of all southern blacks who were registered to vote was estimated at below5 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 drivesthat occurred across the South following Smith. The decision energized the moderncivil righrs movement and ended black political exclusion. As for Brown, in perhapsthe most important revisionist critique of the decision, the legal scholai' Michael J.Klarman argued that strong links exist between the decision and the mobilization ofwhite southern resistance to racial change.'

Charles M. Payne is Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of African American studies, history, and sociology at DukeUniversity. He thanks ThavoÜa Glymph, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Kevin Caines for comments on an earlier draft.

Readers may conracr Payne at <cmpayne@duke.edu>.

' On the pace of desegregation, see James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York, 1962), 3. On school

Thejournal of American History June 2004 83

84 The Journal of American History June 2004

If the legacy of Brown seems clouded now, its significance seemed perfectly clear tomany audiences in 1954. Time magazine called it the most important SupremeCourt decision of all time, excepting only the Dre¿¿ Scott decision; the ChicagoDefender saw in the decision the beginning of the end of a dual society, while themore extreme defenders of segregation saw virtually the end of Western society. Whatdoes it mean that so many commentators, coming at it from so many different direc-tions, got it so wrong? What does it mean that supporters and opponents of segrega-tion alike overestimated the impact of Brown^ What does that imply about the levelof understanding ofthe racial system? Clearly, part ofthe miscalculation involved awidespread tendency to overestimate the power of the law to make change and tounderestimate the degree of racial intransigence outside the South. Those miscalcula-tions, though, may reflect a larger pattern. What the initial misreadings of Brown tellus is that by midcentury, national discourse about race had become thoroughly con-fused; the nature of racial oppression had been effectively mystified. A part of thatmystification process was the reduction ofthe systemic character ofwhite supremacyto something called "segregation." The historian John W Cell points out that theterm is "profoundly ambiguous and self-contradictory" and contends "that this stateof ambiguity and contradiction was skillfully and very deliberately created. Confu-sion has been one of segregation's greatest strengths and achievements."^

A discussion ofthe nature ofthat confiision could start with the 1896 Plessy v. Eer-guson decision, white supremacy's legal fig leaf. Even as white supremacy was beinginstitutionalized, it was developing a rhetoric that hid its nature:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in theassumption that the enforced separation of the rwo races stamps the colored racewith a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything founded inthe act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction uponit.3

So, in the familiar theme, the problem is that there is something wrong with blackpeople; they are just overly sensitive. Still, the Court was also willing to grant thatpart of the problem was the social prejudices ofwhite people:

tesegregation, see Gary Orfteld, "Scbools More Separate: Consequences ofa Decade of Rcsegregacion," July 17,2001, The Civil Rights Project. Harvard University <http ://www.civilrightsprojeer, harvard.edu/research/deseg/separate_schools01.php> (March 3, 2004). Smith v. Alliuright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). On registration, see David].Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven, 1978), 6-7, Thevoluminous literature that locates the "beginnings" of the modern civil rights movement befóte Brown includesJohn Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994) ; Greta de Jong, A Di_ffèrentDay: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana. ¡900-1970 (Cbapel Hill, 2002); Charles M. Payne,I've Got the Light of freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 1995); andMichael J. Klarman, "How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis" Journal of American History. 81(June 1994), 81-118,

- Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle forEquality (New York, 1976), 709; "Editorial Excerpts from tbe Nation's Press on Segregation Ruling," New YorkTimes, May 18, 1954, p. 19. For a discussion ot segregationisr 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 theAmerican South (New York, 1982), 2-3.

' Plessy V. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 551 (1896).

Brown and the Mystification of Race 85

The argument also assumes that social prejudices may he overcome hy legislation,and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except hy an enforced com-mingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are tomeet upon terms of social equality, it must he the result of natural affinities, amutual appreciation of each other's merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.. . . Legislation is powerless ro eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctionsbased apon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accen-tuating the difficulties of the present situation."*

The race problem, then, has nothing to do with power or privilege or exploita-tion—all of which the law might do something about—it is all a question of howwhite and black people feel about each other. In his famous dissent from Plessy, Jus-tice John Marshall Harlan—as irony would have it, a former slaveholder—rejectedthe idea that the separation of the races was merely an expression of individual socialpreferences, seeing it instead as a "brand of servitude and degradation," one elementin a system of racial oppression:

In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to he quite aspernicious as the decision made hy this tribunal in the Dred Scott case. . . . Thepresent decision, it may well he apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions,more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, hutwill encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeatthe beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view whenthey adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.^

Harlan was only stating the obvious truth; segregation was the result of systematicracial domination and would only facilitate more brutal aggressions, more transgres-sive state laws. He lost on the decision, of course, but he also lost the larger battle todetermine how the racial system in the South was to be framed. It became increas-ingly common for white southern spokespersons to do what the Court did: to sepa-rate the act of segregation from the systematic oppression of which it was but a partby framing the racial system in a language of "separation," "customs," "our way oflife," and "social equality." That language constructed race in interpersonal, not struc-tural, terms and put the most acceptable public face on political disenfranchisement,economic exploitation, racial terrorism, and personal degradation. The language alsoimplied a system that worked to everyone's benefit, "enabling each group to developto its highest potential, at its own pace, in its own way, maintaining its distinctivecultural values."*"

According to Cell, when exactly the language and ideology of segregation cametogether remains obscure, but some important points of confluence are clear. In thelate nineteenth century, most southern white leaders were committed to the subordi-nation of blacks. But they were also very sensible of the need not to repeat the mis-takes of 1865—1867; naked attempts at subordination through the Black Codes hadresulted in the trauma of Reconstruction. The phrase "separate hut equal" was being

^ Ibid'• Ibid. 562, 559.'' Cell, Highest Stage of White Supremacy, 2.

86 The Journal of American History June 2004

African American students pose outside a segregated elementary school inHurlock, Maryland. White southern spokespersons maintained that suchinstitutions worked to everyone's benefit, attempting to put a positive faceon an oppressive and exploitative social and political system. CourtesyLihrary of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials fromthe NAACP Records, LC-USZ62-126579.

used by southern spokespersons—editors of regional newspapers, for example—asearly as the 1880s; it seems to have been used most when northern audiences wereinvolved. It was not, however, the language of the most fanatical racists. The phraseseldom shows up in the early twentieth-century speeches of the South Carolina poli-tician Ben Tillman, Gov. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, or Sen. Furnifold Sim-mons of North Carolina. Extreme racists preferred exclusion—instead of separatefacilities for blacks, no facilities at all. Segregation was the language of moderates,particularly used by that group of merchants, industrialists, and planters callingthemselves a movement for the New South. They worked cooperatively with north-ern capital and came to wield disproportionate influence on southern economic andpolitical interests. Yet for the New South coalition to remain stable.

Somehow, in the face of mounting lynching statistics and increasingly militant pro-tests from blacks. Northern opinion had to be mollified. It had to be persuadedthat the "best elements" of the Sourh had the Negro Question well in hand. . . . theemerging segregationist ideology performed its function admirably. Written intopresidential addresses and Supreme Court decisions, it formed the basis for anational reunion of whites.

Brown and the Mystification of Race

By the late 1920s, Cell estimates, euphemism had become the preferred language ofthe white South. By midcentury, the southern paradigm had become deeply embed-ded in national thinking about race.''

The historian David Brion Davis has argued that the Confederacy won the CivilWar ideologically. That is, southern interests disproportionately shaped the way thenation came to think about the issues embedded in the war. Race came to be under-stood through what Davis calls a Confederate-dominated paradigm: Confederateinterests and northern apologists were able to shape a national memory that mini-mized the role of slavery in shaping the nation. In addition, "the reconciliation ofNorth and South required a national repudiation of Reconstruction as 'a disastrousmistake'; a wide-ranging white acceptance of 'Negro inferiority' and of whitesupremacy in the South; and a distorted view of slavery as an unfortunate but benigninstitution that was damaging for whites morally but helped civilize and Christianize'African savages.'"^

To tbis, we might add some corollaries and slight changes of emphasis. First, whatDavis calls the Confederate paradigm has always been most comfortable attributingracial inequality to the characteristics of black people—if not their outright inferior-ity, something at least problematic about their attributes. Thus discussions aboutpoverty, which is usually a racialized topic, become attacks on or defenses of the char-acter of the poor. Or, echoing Plessy, for many majority-group college students thekey problem of race on their campus is the oversensitivity of minority students. Sec-ond, southern elites have always preferred discussions about race in which they arepresented as the aggrieved party, whether that means bearing tbe burden of having tocivilize and support blacks in the nineteenth century or having to put up with reversediscrimination in the twentieth. The states' rights argument is another version ofthis. When he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in 1963,temporarily blocking two black students from entering, Alabama governor GeorgeWallace was trying to frame desegregation as the trampling of his rights by federalauthority, not as his doing anything to black people. Last, apologists for the southernway of life have always preferred to frame race relations in interpersonal, not struc-tural, terms. Endless anecdotes have been told about how close blacks and whiteswere under the old system, how much they looked out for one another. When south-erners spoke of "good" race relations under Jim Crow, they almost invariably meantan absence of conflict between the races, conveniently overlooking the fact thatpower relations were so skewed that conflict was extremely unlikely. When contem-porary college students reduce race to who eats lunch with whom instead of, say, whogets access to higher education, they are proceeding from the same paradigm thatprivileges the interpersonal over the structural. That few of them could even conceiveof a structural way to pose the problem is further proof of Confederate victory.

'' Ibid., chap. 7, esp. 182-83. See also Paul M, Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking(New York, 1970), esp. chap. 4.

" David Brion Davis, "Free at Last: The Enduring Legacy of the South's Civil War Victory," New York Times,Aug. 26, 2001, sec, 4, p, 1.

The Journal of American History June 2004

It is, of course, not difficult to find national teaders interpreting btack strugglethrough a rigidly nonstructural paradigm. Dwight D. Eisenhower, no fan oi Brown,framed his opposition in terms that could have come directly from Plessy, in terms ofthe delicacy of human relationships. "I do not believe that prejudices . . . wilt suc-cumb to compulsion. Consequently, I believe that Federal law imposed upon ourStates . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time." For that state-ment not to be preposterous, one has to conceive of race relations without includingviolence, exploitation, or the deprivation of effective citizenship for millions of peo-ple. If we upset white people, we are going backward. Later, Eisenhower carefullypointed out to Chief Justice Earl Warren that white southerners "are not bad people."^

To take an example from the sixties, it is now largely forgotten that George H. W.Bush began his political career "emphatically" in opposition to what became the1964 Civil Rights Act and was particularly critical of the public accommodationscomponent in the legislation. Echoing Eisenhower, he maintained that legal coercionwas ineffective. What counted in the quest for civil rights, he explained, was what isin a person's heart. ̂ ^

Brown, then, was being interpreted in an ideological context in which manyAmericans almost reflexively understood race in nonstructural terms. Brown was seenas an obvious watershed in part because it seemed to address the presumably all-important issue of how blacks and whites were going to interact as individuals. Froma mid-1950s viewpoint, it was reasonable to believe that having children go to schooltogether would change the role of race in people's lives (although experience hasproven the matter more complicated). As they first looked at Brown, conservativesouthern white elites were trapped in fifty years of their own self-serving constructionof race. Over time, they began to understand, in the historian Joseph Hardin Cres-pino's useful phrase, that black aspiration could be strategicalty accommodated.Accumulated social privilege—class-segregated residential patterns, for example—afforded middle- and upper-class whites significant protection from desegregation.When that did not work, district lines could be gerrymandered, classes could betracked, and segregationist academies could be established. Perhaps most important,southern leadership could learn to use the fear of school desegregation in the rest ofthe country to blunt pressures for desegregation in the South. The ugliest aspects ofwhite supremacy had to be relinquished—unrestrained racist violence, the constantdegradation of blacks, their complete exclusion from formal citizenship—but thatdid not necessarily call for fundamental shifts in power and privilege, certainly not atthe elite levels. The Byrds ofVirginia, the Lotts of Mississippi, Strom Thurmond inSouth Carolina, even George Wallace in Alabama——were able to reinvent themselves.In the process, they were able to pull the nation in their direction, to pull the ideo-logical center of gravity to the right, in part through their skillful exploitation of the

'' Dwight D. Eisenhower has been widely criticized for his attitude toward Brown. Less well remembered is thatimmediately after the ruling, he voiced his hope that the District of Columbia could be among the fitst jurisdic-tions to comply and that it could create a model for others to follow. James T. Patterson, Btown v. Board of Edu-cation: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York, 2001}, 81.

'" Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963—Rouge, 1996), xi.

Brown and the Mystification of Race 89

racial anxieties and racism ofthe rest ofthe nation. One suspects that if someone hadtold southern elites in the late 1950s that in exchange for concessions of civil libertiesto blacks, they would be able to eliminate the idea of liberalism as a legitimate termof political discourse, at least some of them would have considered the bargain wellworth it."

African American attitudes toward racial separation have always been complex. Thesouthern racial system, in fact, allowed for a great deal of personal contact acrossracial lines, perhaps more so than in other parts ofthe country; it just had to be con-tact on terms defined by white people. Southern cities, for example, traditionally hadlower indices of housing segregation than their northern counterparts. Jokesters werequick to point out that the ntunerous light-skinned blacks were living proof thatplenty of integration was happening after dark. Part of the social scientist CunnarMyrdal's optimism about American race relations was based on his finding that whilesouthern whites were most concerned with preventing social equality—which in thiscontext can be taken to mean unregulated cross-racial contact—blacks were primar-ily concerned with access to jobs, housing, and schooling and least concerned withanything like social inequality. The first black students to desegregate schools werefrequently chided for their disloyalty to black schools. One 1955 poll found only 53percent of southern blacks in agreement with Brown. In his study of black working-class protests over segregated public transportation in World War II Birmingham,Alabama, the historian Robin D. C. Kelley concluded that segregation itself was notthe key issue:

Sitting with whites, for most black riders, was never a critical issue: rather, AfricanAmericans wanted more space for themselves, they wanted to receive equitabletreatment, they wanted to be personally treated with respect and dignity, theywanted to be heard and possibly understood, they wanted to get to work on rime,and above all, they wanted to exercise power over institutions that controlled themor on which they were dependent.

In short, after World War II blacks were virtually all opposed to the stigma that wasinvolved in segregation and to segregation insofar as it was used as a tool—often avery important tool—to prevent access to a decent life. But that did not always trans-late into any deep commitment to integration as an end in itself.'̂

Within the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Col-ored People (NAACP), however, one could find a very strict focus on ending segrega-tion, so much so that W. E. B. Du Bois accused the leaders of myopia. The essays hewrote during the 1930s calling on blacks to continue to build strong race-based insti-

" Joseph Hardin Crespino, "Strategic Accommodation: Civil Rights Opponents in Mississippi and TheirImpact on American Racial Politics, 1953-1972" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). On southern politi-cians and the ideological shift to the right, see Carter, From Ceorge Wallace to Newt Gingrich, xii-xv.

'̂ Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modem Democracy (2 vois., New York,1944), I, 61. For tbe 1955 poll, see Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, xxvi. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels:Culture. Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 75.

90 The Journal of American History June 2004

tutions even as they continued to assail segregation might have been regarded asunexceptional in the sense that they described how most blacks were living their livesanyway. Yet Du Bois's essays led to his being drummed out of the organization hehad helped create. Like Du Bois, the NAACP'S membership often saw a more problem-atic side to a strict focus on defeating segregation. In the years leading up to Brown,the historian Adam Fairclough contends, "NAACP officials had a hard time convincingtheir members that integration would be more effective than equalization in obtain-ing a better education for their children." When some expressed fear for the fliture ofblack colleges, Walter White, the organization's executive secretary, replied thatblacks needed to "give up the little kingdoms" that had developed undet segregation.When others pointed out that integration often led black children to feel isolated andalienated, one NAACP lawyer responded that if integration led some black children todrop out, that would have to he borne since there were casualties in all social change.When it was suggested that black teachers and principals might find themselvesunemployed in desegregated systems, the leadership responded that that, too, was theprice of change. Robert Carter, one of the NAACP lawyers who argued Brown, notedthat the legal team "really had the feeling that segregation itself was the evil—and nota symptom of the deeper evil of racism. . . . The box we were in was segregation itself,and most of the nation saw it that way, too."^^

If that was true of most of the nation, it is not clear that it was true of most of thenation's hlack people, either before or after the Brown decision. Initial reactions toBrown among blacks ranged widely. While the NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshallclaimed that segregated schools could be stamped out in five years—although heexpected it to take a lot more lawsuits—and the writer Ralph Ellison saw the decisionas opening a "wonderful world of possibilities" for children, a New York Timesreporter was clearly surprised at the lack of enthusiasm in the black neighborhoods ofWashington, D.C, the day after the Court delivered the opinion. He entitled hisstory "Capital's Negroes Slow in Reacting." According to the writer Richard Kluger,that was not unusual; the mood in many black communities was muted and wary.One black columnist said of Memphis that "there was no general 'hallelujah 'tis done'hullahaloo on Beale Street over the Supreme Court's admission that segregation inthe puhlic schools is wrong. Beale Streeters are sorta skeptical about giving out withcheers yet."'"'

One way in which Brown really was a milestone is that it marked the hegemony ofa certain way of thinking about race. Later, that way of thinking would lead manyAmericans to helieve that the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 had essentially

" W E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography ofW E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the LastDecade of Its First Century (New York, 1968), chap. 17; Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality,1890-2000 (New York, 2001); Robert Carter quored in Kluger, Simple Justice. 534. The Kansas National Associa-tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) originally planned to bring a lawsuit against segregation inthe Wichita schools. It had to be switched to Topeka because of opposition from black teachers and the Wichitaboard of the NAACP. See Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACPS Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, ¡925-1950(Chapel Hill, 1987), 139.

'* Thurgood Marshall and Ralph Ellison quoted in Patterson, Brown v. Board ot Education, 71, 70. New YorkTimes, May 18, 1954, p. 18. For the mood in black communities and the black columnist's comment on Mem-phis, see Kluger, Simple Justice. 710.

Brown and the Mystification of Race

In 1947 these protesters marched in Houston, Texas, to raise awareness ot the disadvantages ofeducational segregation. The National Association for che Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) faced difficulties when trying ro convince its members that the benefits of desegregationwould outweigh the costs to some African American institutions and students. Courtesy Library ofCongress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACI' Records, LC-USZ62-116817.

solved America's racial problems, or at least the black-white component of them. Thedeclaration that Brown was a major turning point bespeaks a similar triumphalism. Tothe scuffling folks on America's Beale Streets, who had to meet rhe Man the day afterBrown, just as they had the day before, it may not have been so clear just what Brownwas going to do for them. It may have been a blow against segregation, but it did notspeak to the range of political, economic, and exrralegal consrraints on their lives.

The historian Dan T. Carrer tells a wonderful George Wallace story. Afrer his1963 stand in the schoolhouse door, Wallace got more than one hundred thousandtelegrams. Over half came from outside the South, and 95 percent of those were sup-portive of what Wallace had done. It was a moment of revelation: "They all hateblack people, all of them. They're all afraid, all of them. Great God! That's it! They'reall Southern! The whole United States is Southern!" One of the most important waysWallace was right is that rhe nation had learned to understand race in southern—thatis, nonsystemic, nonstructural—terms. Had more people understood the implica-tions of that way of thinking, expectations for Brown might have been morerestrained.'^

''' Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 6. Compare George Wallace's comments to one of MalcolmX's jokes: "Black people are always ralking ahour the Sourh, the South. As long as you are south of the Canadianborder, you are in the South."

Copyright of Journal of American History is the property of Organization of American Historians and its

content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.