Brown has not been as fortunate. Most of the long shelfload of books published on the occasion of the decision's fiftieth anniversary focus on the narrowest aspect of Brown's legacy--school desegregation--and overlook the broader and more far-reaching way in which Brown revolutionized the role of courts in American life. Some of these books offer fashionable dismissals of Brown, which, like the belittling of King by radicals, can have tangibly harmful consequences in the wider political culture. For if Brown was a "failure," then aggressive judicial protection of civil rights and liberties in other contexts is likewise more open to disparagement and attack.

The books that examine Brown's racial legacy range from All Deliberate Speed, a hybrid of historical criticism and memoir by Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, to Charles Clotfelter's After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation, a richly instructive "arithmetical history" of how educational integration waxed and then waned in the years after Brown. Supreme Court history aficionados will enjoy With All Deliberate Speed (edited by Norman Silber); while its subtitle, The Life of Philip Elman: An Oral History Memoir, may sound obscure, it provides a fascinating insider's look at the Supreme Court during the 1940s and '50s.

Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants is the most disconsolate new volume, revisiting criticisms of civil rights litigation that Bell--an NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney in the 1960s, now a law professor at New York University--has been articulating for more than two decades. Bell believes that he and other lawyers failed to realize that "racism is permanent in this country," and that excessive faith in integrationist ideals has actually harmed black students' education. A far more optimistic prescription for America's racial future is offered by Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown University law professor who clerked for Thurgood Marshall during his final year on the Supreme Court, in The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream. Cashin's title captures the current media consensus that Brown's legacy for America's public schools has been one of failure rather than success. But unlike Bell, Cashin lays out an integrationist vision fully in keeping with Marshall's own 1954 confidence. She may be outnumbered by those who see Brown as a misguided venture that actually disserved African-Americans, but progressives should think twice before accepting such a negative conclusion about a decision so long and so popularly associated with judicial advancement of civil rights.

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