Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision

Abstract

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court sounded the death knell for school segregation with its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. However, Peter Irons writes that today many of our schools are even more segregated than they were on the day when Brown was decided. In this groundbreaking legal history, Irons explores the 150-year struggle against Jim Crow education, showing how the great victory over segregation was won, then lost again. The author of several award-winning books, Irons ranges from 1849 to the present as he describes a battle that has stretched across most of American history. He skillfully weaves a gripping legal drama out of the stories of brave, now-forgotten men and women, of luminaries such as Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren, and explores the impact of the Brown decision on the communities actually involved in the case. Perceptive, fascinating, and devastating, Jim Crow's children is a major contribution to the national debate over race and its implications for the American educational system.

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