THE RIGHT BOOKS

The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, Tenn.; $24.95), by Raymond Walters, is a carefully researched, delicately (but firmly) argued, and stylishly written study intended to give “an interesting account of desegregation” in the four school districts consolidated on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, plus Washington, D.C., which was ordered the same day by the Court (Bolling v. Sharpe) to desegregate its schools. The bulk of the book consists of Walters’s fascinating history of the total failure of four of these attempts and the partial failure of one of them. Inevitably, Walters is led by his findings to scrutinize the judicial wisdom of the Court in its efforts to tie knots in the sociological Laocoon it had created—less by its conclusion than by its argument, or perhaps one should say its speculative and dubious ramblings pursuant to that argument—in 1954, as well as the subsequent role of the judiciary as a “standing constitutional convention.”

“My own point of view,” Walters tells us in his introduction, “is so different from the prevailing wisdom that it seems advisable to state it candidly at the outset and then present the evidence with a minimum of didactic intrusions.” Yet, his findings support the revised conclusions of the sociologist James S. Coleman, author of the Coleman Report of 1966, for which he acquired the sobriquet, “The Scholar Who Inspired Busing”:

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, Tenn.; $24.95), by Raymond Walters, is a carefully researched, delicately (but firmly) argued, and stylishly written study intended to give “an interesting account of desegregation” in the four school districts consolidated on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, plus Washington, D.C., which was ordered the same day by the Court (Bolling v. Sharpe) to desegregate its schools. The bulk of the book consists of Walters’s fascinating history of the total failure of four of these attempts and the partial failure of one of them. Inevitably, Walters is led by his findings to scrutinize the judicial wisdom of the Court in its efforts to tie knots in the sociological Laocoon it had created—less by its conclusion than by its argument, or perhaps one should say its speculative and dubious ramblings pursuant to that argument—in 1954, as well as the subsequent role of the judiciary as a “standing constitutional convention.”

“My own point of view,” Walters tells us in his introduction, “is so different from the prevailing wisdom that it seems advisable to state it candidly at the outset and then present the evidence with a minimum of didactic intrusions.” Yet, his findings support the revised conclusions of the sociologist James S. Coleman, author of the Coleman Report of 1966, for which he acquired the sobriquet, “The Scholar Who Inspired Busing”: