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Fowler saw Brown’s promise as a mandate
for equality that has not been fully realized in all publicly supported
domains of the realm with which she is most familiar—education. |
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But for Ulen, the decision’s promise was in fact its great achievement:
because it outlawed the racial segregation of public accommodations by
overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, it was a moment of considerable import
in the realm of his expertise—law. |
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Interestingly, Nancy
Cantor’s assessment
of Brown’s promise incorporated both Fowler’s and
Ulen’s evaluations of Brown’s legacy. While she
acknowledged the legal and social values of the decision, she took pride
in the part played by her scholarly domain—social psychology—in
moving the justices to a unanimous decision. She also recognized that
desegregation in the wake of Brown’s mandate has not produced
the practical justice imagined by those who pressed the court to decide
for the Brown plaintiffs, in part because social institutions,
including universities, are slow to change. (Chapter 2) |
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Susan Fowler claimed a personal stake in the Brown decision.
She earned her teaching certification in 1974, and her first assignment
was in a preschool class of special needs children. As Nicole reported,
it disturbed Fowler that “by
the age of seven or eight years old, children with special needs were forced
to enter residential programs at state hospitals, having to live without their
families if they wanted to receive more education.” Fowler continued: “I
guess I had a social justice pulse in me at that time because I can conceive
of nothing worse than children not being able to go to their neighborhood school.” Two
years after she began teaching, Public Law 94-142 was enacted, mandating that
students with a variety of special needs should have access to appropriate education:
this law “had a direct impact on me,” Fowler said, “because
I was teaching those kids, and I no longer had to send them away to a state residential
program for them to go on into school.” Reflecting on her own studies in
developmental psychology and special education, Fowler described how she came
to understand that the Brown decision provided a foundation for all
subsequent civil rights law insofar as it “said that it was discriminatory
to provide any kind of separate accommodations or separate educational arrangements,
whether it was for children with disabilities or for girls who were athletic.” (Chapter
2) |
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Although he said his opinion of Brown as
legal precedent had not changed substantively over the years, recent
analysis of the decision’s legacy left him “really stunned
at the extent to which I now see a pattern of things having occurred
since 1954 and up to the present that has been very instructive.... I’ve
been struck by the fact...that there is a great deal of unfinished business.” Despite
this awareness, Ulen stressed that he didn’t “feel pessimistic” about
what must be accomplished, although “there has been at various
points in the year a tone of pessimism that I must say I find discouraging
about the advances that have occurred since 1954.” In contrast,
Ulen reflected, “I must say I feel mildly—well not mildly,
more than mildly—optimistic about the future. I think we’ve
made great strides. It doesn’t mean that all the problems are behind
us, but we’ve made great strides. . . I think a proper way to look
at this is: we’ve accomplished a great deal in fifty years, we
had a 300-year history before us, before Brown, of racial slavery
and hatred and mistrust and discrimination, and the advances we’ve
made in fifty years over that 300 years have been fairly substantial.
I wish I were going to be around fifty years from now to see the further
advances that are no doubt going to be made.” (Chapter
2) |
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During an interview with the entire EBC research
team, Cantor disclosed that “my own personal/chancellor’s
goals for the Brown Commemoration—and those things are
intersecting but not entirely overlapping—were really first and
foremost to galvanize the campus in its positions to the broader society,
by reflecting back on where it is on issues of race in America.” Further,
by invoking the “spirit of social justice,” Cantor meant
to spur inquiry into efforts to redress the inequalities outlawed by Brown.
When Nicole asked her why the Brown decision was a good point
of departure for discussing racial and ethnic diversity on campus, Cantor
replied that Brown “is important as much for what hasn’t
happened as for what did happen. . . . No one could possibly look at
American society now and say . . . things are the same as they were
fifty years ago, but at the same time you could not look and say that
the promise of Brown has been kept.” In short, it was
the “unsettling but important combination of hope and disappointment” evoked
by Brown that Cantor wanted the campus and the local community
to explore together in 2003-04. (Chapter
2) |
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