Law Commons^™

Book Review, Elaine W. Shoben

Scholarly Works

The Burden of Brown by Raymond Wolters is a long book with a very short message: integration is bad, but desegregation is not. The distinction between the two is crucial to Wolters's analysis. Desegregation is the prohibition of officially sanctioned separation of the races. Integration, on the other hand, is the compelled mixing of the races for the sake of mixing. The "burden" of Brown v. Board of Education, according to Wolters, is that the Supreme Court has blurred this distinction and erroneously requires integration instead of merely prohibiting segregation. Wolters's thesis is that Brown had two prongs: one …