Review Of Brown V. Board And The Mystification Of Race: Article Summary

The article “The Whole United States Is Southern!” : Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race” is written by Charles M. Payne, an American academic whose areas of study include civil rights activism, urban education reform, social inequality, and modern African-American history. Payne argues through the article against the intention of racial segregation being a problem for the Southerners. There’s also pieces on how this concept has interfered with African American lives and how it has affected them. Payne states that the South, as the only region with racial problems, ignores the pervasiveness of racism throughout the whole United States. He also argues that racial groups can develop equally and still a person can know their own worth

Brown's inspiration for more civil rights activism is plausible, but the article states that there would probably be a better case made for Smith v. Allwright, essentially meaning Brown doesn’t have a strong case definitely since no one made another for his case besides an anecdotal. Smith had a decision to outlaw the white primary and the percent of southern blacks who were registered to vote increased indefinitely following Smith. This energized the modern civil rights movement and ended black political exclusion. And for Brown, the most important revisionist critique of the decision was that strong links exist between the decision and the mobilization of white southern resistance to racial change. Starting with so many questions, the author states “Clearly, part of the miscalculation involved a widespread tendency to overestimate the power of the law to make change and to underestimate the degree of racial intransigence outside the South.” Which is giving the understanding that the miscalculations can reflect into a bigger problem, creating a larger pattern. The author states the segregation was a part of that mystification process was the reduction of the systematic character of white