Reexamining Brown v. Board: A Legal Dialogue: Part 7
ACSBlog is pleased to present a multi-part dialogue between two distinguished legal scholars, Professor Michael Klarman of the University of Virginia School of Law and Professor Mark Graber of the University of Maryland School of Law. The subject is the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. We hope readers enjoy the conversation, and encourage your comments.
Part 7. Progress in Race Relations is Often an Unintended Consequence or the Result of Ulterior Motives: Professor Michael Klarman (see previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Mark Graber is surely right that we should not deny that some historical actors have taken racially progressive positions for the best of reasons. White abolitionists -- a tiny, much despised portion of the northern population in the 1830s -- opposed slavery and favored racial equality for religious and moral reasons, not for any ulterior motives. Still, it is striking how frequently in American history racially progressive positions have been adopted for -- at least in significant part -- ulterior motives and how often racial progress has been an unintended consequence of actions taken for reasons having nothing to do with race. These are two slightly different points, so let me elaborate upon them in turn.
On the former point, let me offer four illustrations, taken from my book. The Framers of the Constitution authorized abolition of the foreign slave trade after twenty years less because they were hostile to slavery and more because slave owners in Virginia and Maryland wished to sell their excess slaves to the Deep South states without having to endure the lower prices that competition from newly enslaved blacks imported from Africa would bring. In the 1850s, Free Soilers in the North sought to keep slavery out of federal territories at least as much because they were white supremacists who wished to preserve those territories for white men as because they cared about the welfare of slaves. In 1870, the Republicans enfranchised blacks through the Fifteenth Amendment at least as much because they expected blacks would vote overwhelmingly Republican, which they did, as because they believed that black men deserved the right to vote. Finally -- and here I think Mark and I may disagree a bit -- the State Department in the late 1940s and early 1950s (through the Justice Department’s brief in Brown v. Board of Education) urged the Supreme Court to abolish racial segregation in public education primarily because of the need to combat Soviet propaganda, not because the department was committed to racial progress for its own sake. I don’t deny that some noble people have supported progressive racial change for morally righteous reasons; I do doubt that such people are often numerous enough to significantly influence the course of public policy.
Not only are racially progressive positions often adopted for ulterior reasons, but also racial progress is often an unintended consequence of actions taken for reasons having nothing to do with race. Most northern whites initially fought the Civil War primarily to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. The war became a war against slavery only because emancipating slaves, undermining the South’s labor supply, and enrolling blacks in the Union military ultimately became strategically vital to winning the war.
Millions of blacks migrated from the rural South to the industrial North in the half-century beginning with World War I. They were drawn primarily by novel economic opportunities created by the war. But one enormous, unintended consequence of this migration was the political empowerment of African Americans, who had relocated from a region where they were pervasively disfranchised to one where they could not only vote without significant racial restrictions but where they often held the balance of political power between two evenly divided political parties.
Finally, World War II was a watershed in the history of American race relations. The ideology of the War was antifascist and prodemocratic; a million African American soldiers risked their lives for democracy and came home demanding the rights of democratic citizenship; and the migration of another one and a half million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North profoundly affected the national politics of civil rights by the late 1940s. Yet nobody would argue that a purpose of the war had been to promote racial equality.
Racial progress in American history has often been an unintended consequence of actions taken for nonracial reasons, and racially progressive positions have often been adopted for reasons having little to do with a commitment to racial equality.