Politics and Historical Imagination

Daniel Perlstein

University of California-Berkeley

When I ask students in my educational history and policy courses about the 1954 Brown decision and more broadly about the idea of integration, they recognize that desegregation might be a good strategy to equalize resources but add indignantly that black children certainly do not need to sit next to whites in order to learn. Students of color tend to be more critical of integration than whites, but all have as much difficulty imagining a good integrated school as a good segregated one; all have difficulty imagining the social vision that fueled demands for integration.
 

In part, students’ skepticism about assimilationist demands for racial integration represents an appreciation of the vibrancy of African-American culture and a broader commitment to cultural pluralism.  But there is more. At a time when virtually no educational research or policymaking takes integration seriously, when the courts regularly declare segregated districts unitary, when the rhetoric of race-blind social justice has been abandoned by the left and appropriated by the opponents of equality, it is not surprising that students share other Americans’ skepticism about school integration. Such doubts both limit students’ ability to understand the history of American education and circumscribe their political and social imagination.
 

            Back in the day, political and educational visions were often less narrow.  The demand for integration was animated by the utopian belief that American life could be profoundly transformed so that its reality would match its professed ideals.  In order to assess the campaign for school integration, students, like other Americans, need to recover that sense of transcendent possibility.
 

There are no doubt many ways to help students imagine a time when utopian hopes of creating racial justice seemed more plausible than they do today, and to help them see the ways our social vision has narrowed in the decades since Brown. Some students and I recently explored this closing of the American mind by looking at how the Brown decision is portrayed in two American history textbooks, one used in middle schools today and the other used thirty years ago.  A More Perfect Union, whose authors include prominent historian Gary Nash, is popular today.  In a remarkably inaccurate statement, the book claims that the Brown decision “ordered school integration to proceed immediately.”[1] Nash and his fellow authors assert that the Supreme Court justices launched the civil rights movement, and then they reduce the philosophy of nonviolence to an unexplained demand from Martin Luther King, Jr. that blacks “have compassion and understanding for those who hate us.”[2] Omitting any mention of A. Phillip Randolph’s fight against segregation during World War II, the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the ideals of Malcolm X, or the activities of the Black Panthers, A More Perfect Union provides students with no basis to assess its point of view or to develop their own.
 

A More Perfect Union tells students that the Brown decision heralded the Supreme Court’s declaring segregation illegal in “case after case.”  “Occasionally,” the text acknowledges, when “people in positions of authority make mistakes,” the judicial system “fail[s] the very people it is designed to protect.” Having asserted that reasonable students should trust American courts to protect black rights and should forgive the authorities for the rare times in which they mistakenly harm minorities, it is no wonder that the text’s authors inaccurately reduce the goal of the sit-in movement to challenging segregation laws in court; no wonder that they make no mention of the myriad Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed school integration.
 

An amalgam of falsehood, distortion, and oversimplification, A More Perfect Union is an example of what Angela Valenzuela calls subtractive schooling.[3] Rather than inviting students to assess the impact of the Brown decision,[4] to compare it to their own experience of American race relations or to locate it in the broad sweep of history, the text demands that students parrot pieties about the goodness of authorities.  The text simultaneously asserts its own authority and that of school and state officials. Clearly, this effort at indoctrination is most oppressive to students who have experienced racial discrimination at the hands of school or other state authorities.[5] A More Perfect Union demands not that such students be passive but that they actively repress the social awareness that they inevitably bring to school.  The text fosters the antithesis of any constructivist notion of learning or of authentic historical inquiry.[6]
 

Textbooks did not always do such a miserable job on the Brown decision.  Quest for Liberty, a 1971 text, offers a far richer and more multifaceted historical account than does the dumbed- and dumbing-down More Perfect Union. The older book accurately reports that the Supreme Court demanded that segregation be ended “at a reasonable rate of speed.” The book traces the emergence of the civil rights movement not only to the Brown decision but also to Cold War foreign policy concerns and to the activism of World War II veterans who returned from the battle against Nazism determined to end racism at home.  The text reports the widespread opposition of southern officials to integration, and notes that as late as 1969, President Richard Nixon demanded that southern schools be given more time to desegregate. Quest for Liberty includes a lengthy excerpt from the Brown decision and another lengthy passage in which Martin Luther King explains the logic of nonviolence. Rather than telling students what to think, the older text engages students in serious intellectual and moral questions: “What forces impelled black and white Americans to seek first class citizenship for Negroes?” “Could the Court have decided the issue in any other way?” “Is nonviolence an effective way to protest?”[7]
 

            The contrasting quality of the two history textbooks raised vividly a number of questions for students to consider. Why, despite thirty years of historical work inspired by the civil rights movement (a body of work to which Gary Nash is a significant contributor) is the more recent book weaker in almost every way?  Does the differing political stance of the two books mirror trends in American politics and race relations, and if so how? How and why do educators with profound personal commitments to challenging racism participate in its reproduction?
 

            This discussion invited other, more fundamental questions.  What do we mean by integration and segregation?  What are their origins and purposes? What is the nature of racial justice? Can one reconcile demands for equality, freedom, and community in schools? Why did activists seek desegregation?  Why did they focus on schools? What has been and ought to be the role of the courts in questions of racial justice and in other school reform issues? What role have whites played in promoting and obstructing racial equality in the schools? What role can and should they play? (How) does the changing makeup of American society shape the way we think about Brown and about the future of integration? 
 

We are roughly as distant from 1954 as the civil rights activists seeking school integration were from the time when Plessey v. Ferguson established separate but equal.  Moreover, the crucial development in American racial politics in the decades since Brown has been the transformation of race-blind rhetoric which shaped demands for integration from a means of challenging white supremacy into a means of opposing demands for black equality. Like the authors of A More Perfect Union, American judges, politicians and intellectuals have confused normative and empirical questions, using the claim that we should have a race-blind society to justify policies which assume that we already have one.  At the same time, activists seeking equality and justice have embraced race-conscious remedies.  It is not strange, in such an age, that students have difficulty imagining an integrated society or even a society that would produce aspirations of integration. 
 

I do not aim to convince my students of the virtues of integration or of the liberal project of which it was a part.  The racial culture in which today’s students participate is in significant ways far richer and more dynamic than that of the American 1950s.  And yet, when we study the Brown decision today our thinking is inevitably marked by three decades in which opposition to racial equality has been a driving force in American politics. Our exploration of the contrasting textbooks invited reflection of how we might mirror A More Perfect Union’s lowered aspirations in our own school work.  Our discussion of our own situation fostered our capacity to imagine alternatives to it and introduced our analysis of Brown.

From "Teaching Brown: Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities"
History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004)

Copyright by the History of Education Society. Reprinted with permission.