Everyone understands that Brown v. Board of Education helped deliver the Negro from over three centuries of legal bondage. But Brown acted to emancipate the white South and the Supreme Court as well. Not that the South immediately recognized Brown as a deliverance from economic stagnation, moral debility, and sectional isolation, a deliverance that would end with the installment of one of its own in the White House by 1977. And the Court only barely acknowledged in Brown the full weight of history from which it was itself redeemed. Indeed, the true story of the Court’s own past attitude toward the black man remains one of the deafening silences of the Brown opinion. For half a century after the Civil War, the Supreme Court had, in effect, told the Negro to seek solace not in the law of the land but, like Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe, in cotton fields, mournful song, darkey friends, and the hereafter. It was President Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and Congress that moved to secure Negro rights in the South with no fewer than three Constitutional amendments and four Civil Rights acts shortly after the Civil War. Throughout this period, the Court was eyed distrustfully. The Radical Republicans were “aware of the power the Court could exercise. They were for the most part bitterly aware of it, having long fought such decisions as the Dred Scott case.” Radicals such as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania probably “had little hope that the Court would play a role in furthering their long range objectives.” What hopes they did have centered on those sections of the post-Civil War amendments permitting Congress to act through “appropriate legislation.” In 1865 the Radicals sensed a long-awaited opportunity. Many a proud southern planter was left to his ashes and rubble, to scorched earth and wistful dreams. “The Old South,” wrote one observer in 1870, “has gone ‘down among the dead men’. . . . For that vanished form of society there can be no resurrection. . . .”
Explaining the Selection and Rejection of Harriet Miers: George W. Bush, Political Symbolism, and the Highpoint of Conservatism
