Planning For The Future requires an accurate assessment of what Brown accomplished either directly and indirectly, and what it failed to do. Such a critique is difficult because Brown has become a legal landmark, an American icon embraced as a symbol of the nation’s ability to condemn racial segregation and put the unhappy past behind us. Indeed, the Brown decision has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause. Certainly, few veterans of the efforts to implement Brown through the racial-balance model are objective about the obstacles they faced. A typical response when confronted with their meager progress might be: “Sure, school integration has not worked because real integration has not been tried.” And despite its short-lived effectiveness in desegregating public schools, no one will deny the statistics of improved performance by some of the minority students who attended desegregated schools and their often-positive anecdotes of achievements under fire. The general view remains that Brown was the primary force and provided a vital inspirational spark in the post–World War II civil rights movement. Defenders maintain that Brown served as an important encouragement for the Montgomery bus boycotters, and that it served as a key symbol of cultural advancement for the nation. Even my progressive law students accept the view that Brown achieved more than it did. When I shared my alternative Brown decision (see chapter 3) with my constitutional law class, most students resisted the notion that affirming and enforcing “separate but equal” would have led to more progress than occurred under Brown. Nonetheless, my New York University colleague Paulette Caldwell and I both teach against the view of Brown as the icon of equality. At a dinner honoring Professor Caldwell, one of her students, Stacie Hendrix, told the gathering that she had viewed Brown v. Board of Education as a symbolic victory intended to change the state of race relations in America.
