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From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Michael J. Klarman.* New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 655. $35.00.
INTRODUCTION
No line of cases enhanced the prestige of the Supreme Court as much as Brown v. Board of Education1 and other decisions vindicating the rights of African Americans. Initially, Brown was criticized by some prominent liberal legal scholars for overruling the democratic process in a way reminiscent of hated Lochner-era jurisprudence.2 Later, once a liberal consensus favoring Brown coalesced, and Brown came to be seen by liberals as a courageous, important, and correct decision on behalf of civil rights, the anti-Brown banner was raised, if at all, only by some conservatives opposed to what they perceived as the Court's illegitimate judicial activism.3
In recent years, however, liberal adulation of Brown has come under severe criticism from revisionist scholars associated with the political left. This time, the charge is not that Brown was wrongly decided or otherwise improper as a matter of constitutional law. Rather, Brown revisionists argue that both scholars and the popular media have vastly exaggerated the importance of Brown to the African-American freedom struggle. Moreover, the revisionists suggest that Brown, by focusing the energies of liberal advocates of social change on what the revisionists see as largely unproductive litigation, has actually retarded the progressive agenda.4
Michael J. Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights5 is an impressive addition to the revisionist literature. Klarman pays close attention to the social and political context of civil rights litigation and makes a powerful argument that defenders of the Supreme Court vastly overstate both its inclination and its ability to protect the rights of politically weak racial minorities.6 From Jim Crow to Civil Rights is the definitive study of the Supreme Court's role in the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century. It is also a major contribution to the broader debate over the efficacy of judicial power as a tool for protecting oppressed minority groups.
Reviews of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights have focused primarily on Klarman's discussion of Brown? Like other revisionist writings,8 Klarman's initial works on race and the Supreme Court principally focused on the limitations of Brown and its immediate progeny as vehicles...