Brown as a Children’s Case and the Case for Children’s History

Rebecca de Schweinitz

At the beginning of the twentieth century many reformers argued that in the next one-hundred years notions of childhood would “form the point of view from which all other questions will be judged, all other regulations made.”[1 ]In the mid-1950s the U.S. Supreme Court at least partly based their decision on what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of the Twentieth Century”—“the problem of the color line” on just such a point of view.[2] As legal scholar Robert Mnookin suggests, it was no accident that the Supreme Court chose to rule against segregation on a “children’s case.”[3] Yet if notions of childhood helped “form the point of view from which” the question of segregation was judged, and if it was indeed no accident that Brown was a children’s case, historians have not recognized the significance of ideas about childhood to the Brown ruling and the larger struggle for racial equality in America. This year, as we celebrate the “troubled legacy” of Brown and seek to reappraise the ruling and recover its “submerged histories” seems an opportune time to suggest a few ways in which looking at Brown from the perspective of children’s history might help us better understand the ruling and its significance to the civil rights movement, and conversely, to suggest the importance of children’s history.

Recently Mary L. Dudziak has made a compelling case for examining the Brown ruling in the context of the Cold War.[4] “Brown was the product of converging domestic and international developments” she argues.“Cold War concerns,” America’s concern for its image abroad, “provided a motive beyond equality itself.” As she suggests, “[v]iewing Brown as a Cold War case” provides “new details” and “helps us rethink” the way we tell the Brown story.[5] It also suggests ways that children’s historians can possibily reshape the Brown narrative. For example, Dudziak’s argument about the importance of the Cold War context of Brown leaves room for questions about how international ideas about childhood and the rights of childhood might have contributed to growing international criticisms of America’s Jim Crow practices. As Dudziak notes, public school segregation was “singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere.”[6] Dudziak and others who have been critical of the story scholars traditionally tell about the progressive quality of American racial thought are likely right to suggest that the country’s commitment to racial equality in 1954 was not sufficient in itself to motivate the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation. But perhaps by the 1950s the Court and white Americans were committed enough to ideas about childhood and the rights of children in a democracy to reject, at least officially and in principle, segregation in the nation’s public schools.[7]

If we look at the ways that ideas about childhood and America’s Cold War influenced both each other and the Brown ruling we can also better understand why Cold War fears would have encouraged policy and law makers, civil rights advocates, and child-centered reformers and agencies to champion not just equality of education for America’s black children but equal and integrated educational opportunities. Such a perspective additionally helps explain why racial thinking of the period and the Brown ruling were so focused on the psychological health of black (and white) children. For, as my research suggests, the future of democracy required that America encourage all its children to achieve their full potential and help them to grow-up with well-adjusted, meaning prejudice and frustration-free, personalities. Moreover, a variety of advocates and agencies insisted that those goals could best be accomplished through good schools that gave students real opportunities to develop interpersonal skills and practice democratic living.[8] A perspective that takes into account widespread beliefs about childhood and the Cold War may ultimately explain why school children were given the responsibility of desegregating American society and ending American racism, as well as why the Court, and many others, overestimated the impact of the Brown ruling.[9] To be sure, recent scholarship on Brown examines the decision in the context of postwar racial liberalism and cultural pluralism, especially the rise and influence of psychologized notions of race relations and the strategic role of the nation’s schools in “the therapeutic war against prejudice.”[10] Yet that scholarship virtually ignores the ways that racial liberalism and ideas about prejudice and personality development intersected with widespread beliefs and research about childhood, including beliefs and research that addressed the personality development of white children, children’s roles in the Cold War, and the relative (and natural) lack of racial prejudice in young people. Moreover, new scholarship does not recognize that the convergence of interests in Brown included not only the federal government, racial liberals, and civil rights organizations, but also educational experts and child-welfare advocates who had long sought to extend the rights of childhood to America’s underprivileged children and argued for a system of universal and equal education.

A children’s history perspective on Brown also raises questions that encourages scholars to connect Brown with the ways that America’s struggle for racial equality was presented to the American (and international) public by African-American leaders, organizations, and the press in the years following Brown. Did Brown, with its emphasis on the rights of black children and implicit faith in the ability of young people to overcome adult prejudices shape the stories civil rights activists and the national media told about desegregation struggles? Can we see more clearly the ideas that shaped Brown if we recognize similarities between the ruling and stories about its implementation? And, just as importantly, did ideas about childhood influence the ways the American public, black and white, responded to Brown and subsequent racial struggles? Even if Brown did not represent a complete victory for civil rights advocates, did aligning the civil rights movement with ideas about childhood encourage public sympathy and support for the movement at a crucial juncture in civil rights history? And, did connections between the movement and ideas about childhood ultimately shape and limit pubic support on African-American civil rights issues? Such a line of inquiry seems especially significant since, as Elaine Tyler May has shown, domestic ideals strongly influenced the nation’s political culture during the Cold War, and because scholars have long been interested in gauging the limitations of Brown and its importance (or lack of importance) to the larger struggle for racial equality.[11]

A children’s history perspective on Brown would, of course, also require scholars to ask important questions about how young people themselves both shaped and responded to Brown. Barbara Johns, who initiated and led the Moton High strike in Prince Edward County, Virginia, and other young people like her, still receive little recognition for their decisive roles in the Brown story specifically, and in encouraging black communities to push for racial equality generally.[12] And historians, so concerned about the impact of Brown on local blacks (by which they mean local black adults) and their support or lack of support for the ruling have not asked questions about how young people, black or white, felt about the decision or how it influenced their perceptions of the civil rights movement and of themselves as political actors. But even if, as Charles Payne suggests, Brown “did not speak to the range of political, economic, and extralegal constraints” on the lives of black adults, it certainly did speak to the most obvious constraints on the lives of black children.[13] Moreover, it seems not unlikely, especially in light of the student activism and demonstrations of the late fifties and early sixties, that Brown, and the ideas about children that informed Brown, gave many young people a sense that they could play a vital role in the struggle for racial equality.

If these examples are any indication then clearly the fiftieth anniversary of Brown, converging as it does with an increased interest in children’s history, offers an ideal opportunity for scholars to re-examine the case from the perspective of children’s history and an opportunity for children’s historians to demonstrate the value of their field.

Notes

1. Swedish feminist and reformer Ellen Key quoted by Lawrence K. Frank in “Childhood and Youth” in Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1933) 753.

2. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks, reprinted in Three Negro Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1965) 209.

3. Robert Mnookin, In the Interest of Children: Advocacy Law Reform and Public Policy (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1985).

4. See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case,” The Journal of American History (June 2004) 32-42.

5. Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case,” 40, 34-5.

6. Secretary of State Dean Acheson quoted by Dudziak in Cold War Civil Rights, 101.

7. The Brown ruling specified that “in the field of education the doctrine of separate but equal has not place.”

8. On this and other points made and questions raised in this essay see Rebecca de Schweinitz, “‘If They Could Change the World:’ Children, Childhood, and Civil Rights Politics” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2004). See also my article, “The ‘Shame of America:’ African-American Civil Rights and the Politics of Childhood” in The Politics of Childhood, James Goddard and Allison James, eds. (Pantheon Macmillan, forthcoming ).

9. Charles Payne, in his recent article, “The Whole United States is Southern: Brown v. Board of Education and the Mystification of Race,” The Journal of American History (June 2004) asks: “What does it imply about the level of understanding of the racial system” that “supporters and opponents of segregation alike overestimated the impact of Brown?” But perhaps we might as well ask what it implies about ideas about childhood that both groups expected Brown to effect a social and political racial revolution? (See page 84).

10. See, for instance, Daryl Michael Scott, “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education,” The Journal of American History (June 2004) 69-82; Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” The Journal of American History (June 2004) 92-118.

11. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: America’s Families and the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

12. At the recent Organization of American Historians annual conference in Boston, all three panelists in a session entitled “The Revolutions In-Between; Grassroots Civil Rights Struggles in the Era of Brown v. Board of Education” alluded to significant youth participation in grassroots civil rights demonstrations but none of these scholars was specifically exploring or analyzing youth participation and organizing (and, in fact, had not even considered doing so).

13. See Payne, “The Whole United States is Southern,” 91.

Home -- Next Article