Revolution by Law

In 1966, more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Alabama’s public education system was still so thoroughly segregated that only 2.4 percent of its Black students attended formerly all-white schools. Four years later, the share of Black children in majority white schools had risen to 36.5 percent, a level of integration higher than that of almost every other state in the nation. Behind that dramatic transformation lay Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, the federal court case at the center of Landsberg’s fine new book.Lee started in January 1963, when sixteen Black students in Tuskegee, Alabama, filed a class-action suit against their school board for maintaining a segregated school system in defiance of Brown. Landsberg joined the case three years later, as a trial attorney with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He stayed with it, in various capacities, until he left the Justice Department in 1986 to join the faculty of the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. But Revolution by Law is by no means a memoir. It is a vigorous defense of the law’s ability to create profound social change, presented through Landsberg’s painstaking recreation of Lee’s twists and turns.In Landsberg’s telling, three turns were particularly important. Shortly after the students’ filing, Frank Johnson, the presiding judge, invited the Department of Justice to participate in the case as a friend of the court. In the process, he created a judicial–executive partnership powerful enough to force the desegregation of the county’s schools. George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, triggered the second turn by trying to undermine the court’s orders through a series of state actions. Opposition from the Department of Justice resulted in the court ruling that the state government, not local school boards, bore responsibility for the segregation and desegregation of schools. By the time that the court handed down its second decision in March 1967, the third turn was already underway. Three months earlier the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in another Alabama case that districts could no longer desegregate simply by adding a few Black students to otherwise white schools; they had to create “bona fide unitary system[s] where schools are not white schools or Negro schools—just schools” (166). In May 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court incorporated that language into its defining decision in another desegregation case in New Kent County, Virginia. That decision initiated an intense integration of Alabama’s schools during the next few years. Landsberg views this outcome as indisputable proof of the law’s role as an agent of sweeping, even revolutionary, change.Landsberg is careful to limit Lee’s revolutionary reach to its toppling of the legal regime that sustained Alabama’s segregated schools. He aptly depicts it, however, as the remarkable achievement of lawyers and judges wielding the power of federal law on behalf of ordinary people intent on receiving the justice that they deserved. Nonetheless, almost fifty years after the court’s state-wide ruling, more than forty of Alabama’s school districts have failed to complete integration vigorously enough to remove them from court supervision. Moreover, the forces of racism have repeatedly overwhelmed the justice that Lee was supposed to deliver. This situation is nowhere more clearly evident than in Macon County, where decades of white flight have left the public schools almost as segregated as they were in 1963, when those sixteen children launched a revolution that is still damningly far from fruition

Desegregation · Government (linguistics) · Political science · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · School Choice and Performance