Brown v. Board of Education

Caste, Culture, and the Constitution

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by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond and Leland B. Ware

University Press of Kansas

Due/Published October 2003, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0700612890

This study of Brown - the title for a group of cases drawn from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia traces the lengthy court litigations, highlighting the pivotal role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and including incisive portraits of key players, including co-plaintiff Oliver Brown, newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recognized the crucial importance of a unanimous court decision and helped produce it. The authors simply but powerfully narrate the obstacles these individuals faced and the opportunities they grasped and clearly show that there was much more at stake than educational rights. Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste - it also changed our view of the Court's role in American life.