| Prior to the 1940s, the United States government had done little to promote racial equality for well over half a century, and within the federal government the courts had proven themselves particularly unreceptive to progressive social views. Yet by the mid-1950s this situation was transformed, and this transformation created the foundations on which the achievements of the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s would be built. My dissertation explains this dramatic policy shift by analyzing the origins of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 school desegregation opinion. This project has a central motivating question: why did the nine justices of the Supreme Court, whose political and ideological affinities varied considerably, decide to make, at this time and place, a statement against blatant legalized racial discrimination? My answer to this question draws on the context of thought, culture, and politics in early postwar America, as well as the particular legal issues confronted by the justices.; The Supreme Court ruled racially segregated schooling unconstitutional largely because the justices concluded that the nation was ready for such a ruling. They would not have come to this conclusion without the successful efforts of a generation of committed racial reformers who framed a new approach to race relations and public policy in the 1940s, an approach I term "racial liberalism." In the postwar era racial liberals transformed the liberal establishment's views on the responsibility of the federal government to secure the civil rights of African Americans. They constructed an interpretive lens that influenced how a generation of liberal academics, journalists, and policymakers viewed the changing social dynamics of postwar America. Racial liberalism, in my account, was more than just a reform effort. It was also an ideological transformation. And the Brown decision was a product of this transformation. |
