Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Drawing on the neglected connection between racial politics and the Cold War, Mary Dudziak (379, quoted in Mullen, 378-380) emphasizes that the Justice Department in this period urged an end to segregation "because of its use in Soviet propaganda". But if the Brown decision (1954) served that need, broadcasting abroad America's democratic intentions - and perhaps stimulating, inadvertently, the Southern movement - it proved otherwise ineffectual. Despite the long and thorough legal preparation by NAACP and other groups, through the mid-1960s, Southern schools remained racially divided; and segregation in the North was not challenged until a decade later. The pace of change depended less on legal argument than on politics; and today, under the leadership of Federal judges appointed under a succession of Republican presidents, the schools are firmly re-segregated (Bell; Ogletree; Orfield, Eaton and Harvard Project on School Desegregation), making transparent the politics of the process, both in its advertised ascent and quiet decline.
Repository Citation
Goodman, Mark J.. "Before Moynihan: Stanley Elkins's Slavery(1959), Psychoanalytic Discourse and the Cold War." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–7. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/31