Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution.

Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution. By Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Landmark Law Cases and American Society. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 292. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-7006-1289-0; cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-7006-1288-2.)

The fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education occasioned the publication of some fine books recounting the case and assessing its significance. These included James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York, 2001), and Peter Irons, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York, 2002). In the present book Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware offer a wide-ranging and important exploration of how "caste" and "culture" have related to the U.S. Constitution, and their book supplies far more substance on the century before Brown than does either of the other books, though less on Brown's aftermath than does Patterson.

Cottrol and his coauthors considerably exceeded the average length of other books in this series, and one suspects that, even so, they had to trim some valuable material. In particular, one looks for more than can be found here on developments after the decisions in Brown. The Virginia case of Green v. School Board of New Kent County (1968), for example, gets but a single sentence; and a timeline of events lists nothing later than that case. Far more than either Irons or Patterson, the authors of this book bring higher education into the mix, not only in the ways that cases on higher education laid the groundwork for Brown but also regarding consequences for higher education that flowed from Brown. Yet future syntheses of the story of segregation, desegregation, and the Constitution must expand the role of higher education considerably more. This book makes no mention, for example, of Board of Trustees v. Frasier, a 1956 U.S. Supreme Court decision about the University of North Carolina in which Brown was applied directly to undergraduate programs.

Another dimension that cries out for further recognition and development has to do with racial identity. Brief passages comment on the largely European antecedents of the 1896 plaintiff Homer Plessy and on the even more negligible African ancestry of NAACP leader Walter White. Other opportunities go begging, in part because of an unexamined premise that any ascertainable African ancestry led Americans, in law and culture virtually everywhere, to be assigned a black racial identity. Yet, for example, fascinating cases in the early decades of the twentieth century from state courts in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi addressed school-age citizens who were legally white but had some African ancestry and, after having previously attended white elementary schools, were then barred from them as their "white" neighbors applied heightened requirements regarding racial purity.

The authors observe that other racial and ethnic groups in U.S. history, too, have experienced exclusion and other discrimination, but they assert-correctly, to my mind--that "black people have been uniquely singled out for treatment as a separate caste" (p. 10). This fact is truer than the authors sometimes recognize--"caste" and "culture" require even closer examination. After World War II, for example, the University of Mississippi was not exclusively nonwhite, even while it remained resolutely nonblack (so it can be called "historically white" but not "all-white"). The authors say that the University of Oklahoma was "restricted to whites" (p. 108), but that fact was an artifact of state law that long defined people of African ancestry as nonwhite and all others, including Native Americans, as white.

This thoughtful, wise, accessible, and prize-winning book should be kept in print as an exceptional introduction to the thorny issues that led up to Brown v. Board of Education and its long aftermath. But I urge that it be revised to accommodate updates--in events and in the literature--as well as corrections of nagging little errors.

PETER WALLENSTEIN

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University