All the eminent early critics of
Brown were clear that the
outcome of the case was morally right and eminently desirable as public
policy; and with the "Massive Resisters"—those Southern politicians and their
allies in the press determined to prevent any school desegregation-disinterring
arguments about "state sovereignty" and "interposition" thought to have perished
at Appomattox, persons of good will had no choice but to rally round the Court.
Even if some of the Southern arguments against
Brown struck home—(how,
for instance, if the Fourteenth Amendment had actually forbidden the states to
maintain racially separate schools, had that fact gone essentially unremarked
for almost a century?),it was best not to admit it, even to oneself.
But the moratorium on serious discussion
could not last. It began to crumble because of scholarly works in the seventies
(notably Richard Kluger's Simple Justice) detailing how the
decision in Brown had come about. While the tenor of this literature was
reverential, deeply troubling disclosures kept popping up.
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