Brown v. Board in the World: How the Global Turn Matters for School Reform, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledlge

Global perspectives can contribute to our understandings of any one nation’s laws and decisions. In this light, America’s educational landmark, Brown v. Board of Education, matters not just for the United States but around the world. Inside the United States, a cottage industry of academic scholars studies the influence of Brown where the decision’s impact reaches well beyond racial desegregation of schools. The litigation has by now a well-known and complicated relationship to actual racial integration within American schools, as the case perhaps exacerbated tensions and slowed otherwise gradual reform, and perhaps at the same time galvanized the social movement enabling major legislative and social change—producing notable change in the racial composition of schools by the 1970s, and yet further backlash and shifts returning schools to considerable racial separation by 2004.