Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement

"[Author] has compressed his study of the Supreme Court's rulings on race into a tight foucs around one major case--Brown v. Board of Education. [author] goes behind the scenes to examine the justices' deliberations and recaps his famous backlash thesis, arguing that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to change than for encouraging civil rights protest and that it was the resulting violence that transformed northern opinion and led to the landmark legislation of the 1960s. [author] also sheds light on broader questions such as how racial attitudes change over time; how much judicial decisions depend on legal, political, and peronal considerations; and the realtionship between Supreme Court decisions and social change."--Back cover.