Profound changes in American racial attitudes and practices occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. The U.S. Supreme Court often receives substantial credit for initiating those changes. In this chapter I examine the social and political conditions that enabled the modern civil rights revolution and situate the Court’s racial rulings in their historical context. As we shall see, the Court’s decisions reflected, more than they created, changing racial mores and practices. Even Brown v. Board of Education, so often portrayed as the progenitor of the civil rights movement, was rendered possible only by sweeping social and political forces that emanated mainly from World War II.

BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS

As World War I ended in 1918, few would have predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would one day become a defender of the rights of racial minorities or that its rulings would have a significant impact on the struggle of blacks for racial equality. Late in the nineteenth century, the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had declared state-imposed racial segregation consistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) the justices had rejected constitutional challenges to state measures that disfranchised blacks. Court rulings such as these led a black newspaper in the North to opine in 1913 that “the Supreme Court has never but once decided anything in favor of the 10,000,000 Afro-Americans in this country”; the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) concluded in 1915 that the Court “has virtually declared that the colored man has no rights.”