“The Whole United States Is Southern!”: Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is becoming a milestone in search of something to signify. It would be going too far to think of the case as an early example of a media event, as more hype than substance, but even with a half century of perspective, it is difficult to say with confidence just why Brown has seemed to matter so much. School desegregation on a broad scale does not seem to be feasible public policy. In 1962, after eight years of experience with Brown, one writer observed that at the then-current pace, Deep South schools could be completely desegregated in just a bit over seven thousand years. Some of the progress made toward desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s has eroded. When desegregation does occur, the social and academic outcomes are not so uniformly positive as was once...