Brown V.

Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement by Michael Klarman

Klarman also examined Brown's direct and indirect impacts, believing that Brown did not affect the

course of race relations in the United States, nor did it spark the civil rights movement. According to

Klarman, the Court's decision clearly increased the salience of school segregation, encouraged blacks to

litigate against it, altered the order in which racial practices would otherwise have been contested,

mobilized extraordinary resistance to racial change among southern whites, and created concrete

opportunities for protests and violence. The Brown’s decision produced a political environment that

allowed for the ruthless suppression of civil rights marches. When such violence occurred and was

vividly relayed to national audiences via television, formerly apathetic northern whites were awoken

from their stupor, resulting in calls for national civil rights legislation. This is not to say that Brown was

insignificant since it affected the black liberation movement. The Court's decision to make segregation

illegal was symbolic, and it encouraged optimism and faith in the possibility of significant racial progress.

Brown directly motivated southern blacks to file petitions and lawsuits demanding school desegregation,

which very definitely would not have occurred in the mid-1950s, at least not in areas like Mississippi or

South Carolina, if not for Brown. Brown therefore defined the agenda of southern blacks.

Ultimately, the book's main point is that racial change in the United States was unavoidable due to a

combination of deep-seated social, political, and economic causes. These racial change drives would

have destroyed Jim Crow despite the Supreme Court action; in fact, the Brown decision was only

judicially conceivable in 1954 because the forces of change had been setting the ground for decades.

Although Brown v. Board of Education was important in the passage of significant civil rights legislation

in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, the actual line of causation linking Brown to this revolutionary racial

change is significantly different from what is widely assumed.