W&M Featured Events
[PAST EVENT] How Racial & Legal Conservatives Won the Constitutional War Against Brown v. Board of Education
Access & Features
- Open to the public
- Registration/RSVP
Join the School of Education for our next DEI lecture featuring Dr. Jamel Donnor, associate professor of education and affiliated faculty in American Studies, Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies.
Since 1954, legal conservatives in the United States have been engaged in a campaign to redefine Brown v. Board of Education’s original purpose of guaranteeing legal equal protection for Black children in public education.
Because Brown was and is the correct interpretation of the 14th Amendment, legal conservatives, also mindful of the decision’s immediate value to the country’s Cold War battle against the Soviet Union, shrewdly pursued a long-term strategy to undermine the ideas, political institutions, judicial texts, and legal theories undergirding the decision because of their long-term coercive capability and doctrinal value, respectively. Specifically concocting a pseudo-method of interpreting the Equal Protection Clause, termed as originalism, legal conservatives embarked upon an ideological counter-revolution to reinscribe a Dred Scott era reading of the U.S. Constitution onto contemporary equal educational opportunity cases involving school desegregation.