Although most
American history texts hail
Brown as a
landmark in
civil rights reform, there have been dissenters from this idea. Probably the most pronounced is
Gerald Rosenberg of the
University of Chicago, who wrote a book called
The Hollow Hope to
debunk the so-called myth of social change from the court system.
Brown takes up a couple of chapters in his argument, which I'll summarize for those of you who don't have time to read the whole book.
Brown was decided in 1955. That year, 0.12% of black children in the South were attending integrated schools. By 1963, that number had skyrocketed (cough cough) to 0.45%. Clearly, not much was happening. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where Congress got in on the action: in 1966, almost 17% of black children were attending integrated schools, and by 1970, there were more black children in integrated schools than segregated schools.
The implication is that Brown did next to nothing to integrate the schools, and that it took the initiative of Congress and the President to actually make the integration work. Irfan has already mentioned the lackadaisical attitude of the South in following the Brown decision, but in this case, statistics speak louder than words.
So what, exactly, did the Brown ruling do? It marked the first time in history that federal case law recognized black and white children as true equals. It set the stage for further government actions, culminating in the 1964 Act, that would close the broad gap separating black and white students in the South. And, of course, it was a moral victory for the NAACP, which would come back to the Supreme Court time and time again to fight for civil rights.