UD prof authors book on Brown vs. Board of Education

10:42 a.m., March 8, 2004--The 50th anniversary of the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court ending segregation in the United States is marked by a new book, “Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution,” by Leland B. Ware, Louis L. Redding Professor of Law and Public Policy in the School of Urban Affairs, with coauthors Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law at George Washington University, and Raymond T. Diamond, C. J. Morrow Research Professor of Law at Tulane University.

Published by the University Press of Kansas, the book has won the Langum Project for Historical Literature award.

Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs editor of The New Republic, wrote that the book gives “a vivid and comprehensive account of the historical, legal and political dramas surrounding one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the 20th centuryŠ.Accessible and shrewd in its judgments, this will be one of the definitive accounts of the Brown decision for years to come.”

As the authors point out, “Brown had a significance that went far beyond the concerns of the parties involved or even the precedent-making decision that was rendered. Brown touched on the core contradiction in American life.” That contradiction, they wrote, was “the founding generation that boldly declared independence and crafted a constitution enumerating the rights of citizens lived in a nation in which 20 percent of the inhabitants were enslaved.”

Brown was shaped by the background of segregation and the “struggle against the caste system that had deep roots in American culture and strong protection in American law.
This is, in part, the story of a group of visionaries who early in the last century retained their faith in the Constitution and its idealsŠ.It is also about the legal strategies those visionaries fashioned and how those strategies helped shape the decision in Brown.”

Brown had other ramifications as well, the authors wrote, and has become “Exhibit A in the case for a more activist judiciary, an argument that courts, because of their relative insulation from political pressures, might in fact be better vehicles to resolve knotty social problems.”

The book also includes Delaware’s role in the Brown case. Two separate cases were filed in Delaware that were involved in the Brown decision. One involved separate educational facilities for black and white children living in Claymont, and the other was filed by a white mother in Hockessin of an adopted black child who had to attend “a dilapidated one-room school house that served black students.” Louis Redding, the noted black civil rights lawyer, represented the plaintiffs.

Ware said he has been interested for the past 20 years in the series of legal cases brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before the Brown case and that this area has been the focus of his research and teaching. This spring, he is scheduled to make presentations on Brown at the University of Florida School of Law, the Atlanta, Ga., Southern Regional Council, a civil rights organization, and the Law and Society conference in Chicago.

Leland B. Ware, Louis L. Redding Professor of Law and Public Policy

A graduate of Fiske University, Ware received his juris doctorate from Boston College Law School. He has written more than 70 articles on civil rights law. He serves on the editorial board of Fair Housing/Fair Lending Reporter and is vice president of the national board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union and on the board of directors of WHYY public radio and television.

Before coming to UD in 2000, Ware was a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, was university counsel for Howard University, a trial attorney for the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and assistant regional attorney for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Atlanta.

Symposium scheduled

In conjunction with the Supreme Court decision on May 17, 1954, “The Redding Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education: Celebrating the Past, Considering the Present and Contemplating the Future,” will be held April 23 at Clayton Hall.

Several groups are organizing the event, including the University, the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, the Metropolitan Wilmington Urban league, the Widener University School of Law, Delaware State University and the Delaware State Bar Association.

Participants will include lawyers, academics, civil rights activists, community leaders and others who will discuss the Brown decision and school desegregation in Delaware and the United States. They include Jack Greenberg of Columbia Law School and former director of the NAACP’s defense fund, who will be the keynote speaker; Juan Williams, a former Washington Post reporter and author of “Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary”; Patricia Williams, author, columnist and professor at Columbia Law School; and James T. Patterson, professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy.”

The symposium is free and open to the public but preregistration is required. For additional information visit [http://www.udel.edu/suapp/brown/index.htm] or contact
Ware at 831-3930 or at [lware@udel.edu].

Article by Sue Moncure
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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