By: David J. Garrow
The story of the Warren Court’s impact on the U.S. South is of
course far larger and more wide-ranging than just the direct legacy
of Brown v. Board of Education. Indeed, this is a
question of not just “Beyond Brown,” or, better yet, “Beyond Brown
and Baker,” but of appreciating how the obstructive behavior of the
South, in the face of Warren Court rulings, affected the wider
judicial decision-making of the Court just as much as the Court’s
holdings altered so many aspects of southern life, both public and
private.
Brown is a major part of that story, as is Baker and its
decisive, Deep South progeny, Reynolds v. Sims. This paper
discusses four other important and often-overlooked chapters in
this story as well: first, the Court’s own frightful and halting
behavior in other, little-known and sometimes tragic race cases in
the immediate wake of Brown; second, the ways in which the Court’s
belief in racial equality significantly spurred its efforts to
reform criminal justice procedures nationwide; third, the
tremendously under-appreciated manner in which the activism of the
southern Black freedom struggle stimulated the Court to vastly
expand federal judicial jurisdiction in ways that helped protect
the constitutional rights of any citizen prosecuted in a southern
state court; and fourth, the degrees to which even ostensibly
unrelated areas of substantive federal law, ranging from First
Amendment rights of association, to the law of libel, to the
procedural protections afforded public aid recipients, all were
likewise transformed on account of the collision between the Warren
Court and white public authorities in the South. All told,
that larger story is one whose scope far exceeds the standard
narrative about Brown and race, or even the more expansive one
about Brown and Baker’s explicitly shared grounding in the
fundamental guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.