Howell S. Baum. Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. xv + 274 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4808-9; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-7652-5.

Reviewed by Jared Leighton (University of Nebraska)
Published on H-1960s (March, 2012)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-Smith (University of the Fraser Valley)

In his new book, Howell S. Baum reports that on the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown decision, black students in Baltimore had less chance of encountering white classmates than black students in any other large American school district.  This situation begs the question, how do we reconcile a Supreme Court decision that ordered integration in American education with the persistent segregation in urban schools we see today?  In Brown in Baltimore, Baum places much of the blame on the ideology of liberalism and its failure to address problems of race. 

Baum’s findings agree with the current consensus on Brown that benefits from decades of hindsight.  It is widely recognized that the decision did not produce a great deal of integration in public schools.  However, many argue that the decision did provide inspiration and hope to the burgeoning civil rights movement and fueled other efforts for racial justice.[1]  Given Baum’s background in city and regional planning, it is understandable that he has little to say about the effect of the decision on the civil rights movement.  But, in assessing the efficacy of Brown in producing integration, Baum clearly shows that it failed to bring black and white children together in Baltimore’s public schools. 

Continuing in the line of recent historical works on the racial politics of border areas, Baum analyzes the Baltimore school district because it was the only one that attempted to immediately comply with Brown using free choice alone as its desegregation strategy.[2]  This allows historians to see the effects of unfettered free choice of schools over time.  It also allows the reader to see a different kind of racism.  Instead of massive resistance and the threat of violence, the Baltimore case shows well-intentioned black and white liberals refusing to make the tough decisions that would push integration and allowing families to perpetuate segregation.  Though Baltimore stands out in this respect, Baum also emphasizes that “the course of Baltimore desegregation reflected the national conflict over race” (p. 208).  He continually highlights the impact of national policies, like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and national tragedies, like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on integration efforts in the city.

While other historians have included criticism of civil rights liberalism in their works, Baum places the failure of liberal ideology at the center of his book.[3]  Baum begins by providing a two-part explanation for why liberalism could not integrate schools.  First, he argues that laissez-faire liberalism encouraged school officials to see children as individuals operating in a free market, rather than as students with racial identities that had been used to separate them into different learning environments.  If prior school policy had segregated students by preventing black children from choosing to attend white schools, a liberal policy need only eliminate this barrier.  So, school officials in Baltimore altered the process of distribution, rather than its outcome.

Second, Baum argues that liberalism discouraged people from talking about race.  Because liberal ideology did not see people as members of groups, liberals ignored issues of race.  On this point, Baum is less convincing.  While he is particularly critical of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) for being too hopeful about the prospect of resolving racial problems, that landmark study challenged Americans to think about racial injustice and the national creed.  Myrdal’s work was widely distributed, opened up a national conversation on race, and was cited in the Brown decision.  The Brown decision itself prompted further dialogue about race. 

Baum’s criticism of civil rights liberalism is based on his analysis of two decades of efforts to comply with or avoid the federal order.  To build his argument, Baum draws on education reports and statistical data; newspaper accounts, especially by the Baltimore Afro-American; archival sources at Howard University; secondary sources on the ideology of liberalism and the civil rights movement; court records; and some oral histories of civil rights leaders and education officials, both from collections at the Maryland Historical Society and his own interviews.  While he provides context preceding and following this era, the years 1954-78 form the core of his book. 

Following the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling, the Baltimore school board took the path of least resistance by allowing free choice of schools, which would require families to elect integration.  This led to a situation in which blacks chose schools because of their educational quality and whites chose schools because of their racial composition.  There were other issues that further complicated free choice which Baum addresses.  The poor condition and lower teacher quality of many black schools discouraged people from choosing them.  Also, the continued in-migration of black students and white flight to the suburbs made racial balance more difficult.  Baum believes that the free choice policy meant no one could know what a school’s racial composition would be from year to year.  Instead of allowing whites to segregate within the district, the laissez-faire policy encouraged whites to leave the district entirely because they could not be sure of the racial composition of a school by the start of the fall term. 

As the school board and administration moved from predominantly white to predominantly black, the free choice policy remained.  Baum reasons that this policy served the predominantly black school board by allowing them to avoid talking about race in the tense environment following the death of King and the Baltimore riot in 1968.  The author points out that other paths remained open.  He argues that where school boards firmly implemented desegregation and where it had time to become an accepted reality, integration resulted and produced beneficial effects.

Brown in Baltimore is clearly written, following a coherent chronology.  This is a difficult task, because, as Baum recognizes, “the disjointed sequence of interim plans and revised plans for different grade levels could easily draw attention to details separated from any big picture, and the back-and-forth of these proposals and federal critiques could numb the mind” (p. 184).  Given this challenge, the author often does well to avoid the tedium of discussing educational policy. However, the book occasionally becomes too detailed in its explanation of district composition and complex plans for desegregation.

In this respect, it would have been useful to intersperse individual stories with policy analysis.  At one point, the author remarks, “what stands out in the decades of desegregation effort is black children’s invisibility in school policy” (p. 209).  But, as a result of Baum’s focus on education policy at the administrative level, black children also remain invisible in his work.  Aside from the brief mention of a few students, the reader gets little sense of what failed integration policies meant for the children and how it affected their academic achievement.  In this respect, oral histories of students who attended Baltimore schools would have been beneficial.[4]

As an account of school desegregation at the policymaking level, though, Brown in Baltimore is an important book.  While the author offers the reader plenty of detail about various policies and administrative issues, he does not lose sight of the larger currents affecting education in the city.  Baum provides an excellent account of Baltimore school desegregation which analyzes school policy at the intersection of major forces in American life, especially institutional racism and political liberalism.

Notes

[1]. For works which argue that Brown failed to produce much integration but did energize the civil rights movement, see James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); and Peter F. Lau, ed., From the Grass Roots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).  While Derrick Bell argues that it may have been better for the Supreme Court to equalize segregated schools in Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes of Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), he agrees that the new normative vision provided by the Supreme Court gave hope to those working for black civil rights that they would have legal support.  The sharpest dissenter is Michael J. Klarman, whose “backlash thesis” argues that the abolition of Jim Crow was inevitable, Brown crystallized southern resistance to racial change, and the influence of the Supreme Court decision on the civil rights movement is overstated.  For a brief presentation of his argument, see Michael J. Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” The Journal of American History 81 (June 1994): 81-118; and for a more recent and in-depth analysis, see Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[2]. For other works on civil rights in border areas, see Peter Levy, Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Kenneth S. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest: The Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri, 1964-1970 (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Tracy E. K’Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980 (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

[3]. Some important works on the limits of civil rights liberalism include Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

[4]. Readers interested in the effect of school desegregation policies on students should refer to Midred Wigfall Robinson and Richard J. Bonnie, eds., Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which collects essays from forty professors from around the country who attended school in the post-Brown years.

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Citation: Jared Leighton. Review of Baum, Howell S., Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. March, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34428

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