A man should be able to find an education by taking the broad highway. He should not have to take by-roads through the woods and follow winding trails through sharp thickets.
—Judge John Minor Wisdom, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Meredith v. Fair (1962)
James Meredith had been nothing but forthcoming. In his application letter of January 31, 1961, he requested admission to the University of Mississippi as a “Negro citizen.” University administrators rejected him, but they never acknowledged his race. They moved the application deadline to make him ineligible and revised their admission policies to disqualify him, but they never once addressed the question of whether a black man could attend a white university.
This exchange is the perfect example of what Robert Carter called the “indirect” power of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). A veteran of the legal team that represented the plaintiffs and a careful guardian of Brown’s legacy, Carter argued that in addition to integrating schools and overturning the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown also “completely altered the style, the spirit, and the stance of race relations.”11xRobert Carter, “The Warren Court and Desegregation,” Michigan Law Review 67, no. 2 (1968), 247. See also Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Segregationists could no longer openly enforce segregation. In order to maintain America’s racial caste system, they were forced to resort to bad-faith admission policies and retroactive deadline adjustments.
Constance Baker Motley, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who would go on to become the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, first noticed the shift in strategy in Georgia.22xTomiko Brown-Nagin, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2023), 117. Two years before she filed suit on behalf of James Meredith, she represented Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, both of whom had been denied admission to the University of Georgia because they were black. When the case went to trial, university president Omer Clyde Aderhold testified that the applicants were rejected because the university was crowded and the dorms were full.33xHolmes v. Danner, 191 F.Supp. 385 (M.D. Ga. 1960), https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/191/394/1450807/. It was his only option. Aderhold worked for Governor Ernest Vandiver, who promised that not one black student would be admitted to segregated schools on his watch. But five years before Vandiver was elected, the US Supreme Court had found that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Trapped between Vandiver and Brown, Aderhold lied about the size of his dorms.
Five months later, on May 31, 1961, Motley filed Meredith v. Fair (so called after Charles Dickson Fair, president of the University of Mississippi board of trustees) to compel Ole Miss to admit James Meredith. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, she alleged that the university deprived Meredith and “other members of his class” of the right to attend institutions of higher learning “upon the same terms and conditions applicable to white citizens.”44x“Complaint,” Meredith v. Fair, 199 F. Supp. 754 (S.D. Miss. 1961), https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/199/754/2391390/. The university refused to engage the substance of her allegations. Rather than respond to charges of racial discrimination, administrators insisted that their campus was full.
Brown thus introduced an asymmetry into arguments over race and education. Motley and her clients were openly pursuing integration, but their opposition refused to engage. Straightforward argument was met with misdirection; appeals to justice were met by protestations of insufficient space. In the metaphor of John Minor Wisdom, the judge who wrote the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ finding in favor of the plaintiff, the open argument of the “broad highway” was met with the obstructionism of “sharp thickets.” The defendants didn’t deny the constitutional validity of Brown; they simply argued that institutions were ill prepared, that applications were incomplete, or that applicants themselves were unqualified. Ostensibly colorblind policies, such as those preventing crowded dorms, replaced race as the principle of selective admissions without altering the purpose of selective admissions—the preservation of an all-white university. While these policies originated in racial animus and tended toward racial segregation, the men who devised them denied their origins and dismissed any racial impacts as incidental.
Although the Fifth Circuit ruled for Meredith, Judge Wisdom lamented the fact that Meredith had been forced to navigate the “sharp thickets” of bad-faith policies in order to integrate the University of Mississippi. Meredith v. Fair thus sits uneasily vis-à-vis Brown v. Board of Education. The case was brought in straightforward racial terms—could “Negro citizens” be denied the equal protection of the law?—but was decided by wrangling over classroom capacity. With the broad highway and the sharp thickets in such proximity, Meredith v. Fair illustrates both the considerable power of Brown and the limits of its remedies.
Seventy years after Brown, integration may feel like a battle that’s already been won. But the backstory of Meredith v. Fair reminds us that we are still living in Brown’s shadow. Indeed, to understand the fierce debates over critical race theory in twenty-first century classrooms, school boards, and legislatures, we need to revisit the moment of its gestation: not Brown per se, but the struggle to make the ideals of Brown a reality in American education. We need to revisit Meredith v. Fair.
As it is known today, critical race theory is a set of interconnected convictions about the extent to which racism is woven into every last nook and cranny of culture (including the liberal redoubts which fancied themselves above the fray), but it originated with the difficult recognition that the biggest wins of the civil rights era (like Brown) could not even secure integration, let alone equity. Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the midst of the heartbreak that followed Brown.
A Question of Compliance
To appreciate the competing legacies of Brown v. Board of Education, consider the contrasting conclusions drawn from Meredith v. Fair by two of James Meredith’s lawyers, Constance Baker Motley and Derrick Bell. Motley remembered the Meredith case as a validation of Brown and the definitive demise of Jim Crow. Bell remembers it as a testament to the adaptability of antiblack racism. If Motley was attuned to the open highway, Bell was attuned to the thickets. Where Motley saw a victory for the principles of Brown, Bell saw the appropriation of Brown into the logic of white supremacy. Where Motley saw the death of segregation, Bell saw the birth of a new racialized regime.
In the 1960s, Bell and Motley worked together at the Legal Defense Fund representing Meredith and hundreds of other plaintiffs in desegregation cases. Although Motley left the LDF in 1964 and Bell in 1968, their respect for each other never waned. They remained friends to the end, sharing personal milestones, professional news, and recommendations of good students.55xConstance Baker Motley Papers, Box 1, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Although they drew different lessons from Meredith, those conclusions were neither incompatible nor adversarial. Motley was right that Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi was a validation of Brown. But Bell was also right. Meredith may have won the battle to integrate Ole Miss, but behind the arguments made by the university and its lawyers lurked a strategy that would one day push Brown toward irrelevance.
Constance Baker Motley was Meredith’s hero. When she agreed to represent him in his quest to integrate the University of Mississippi, he counted it “the best possible thing that could have happened.”66xJames Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 56. First published 1966.
It truly was. Motley shepherded his case through the courts for nineteen months and visited the state of Mississippi twenty-two times on his behalf. She told him whom to write to at the university, when to write, and what to say. When he was discouraged, she lifted his spirits by bringing him to her home in New York City. When his grades suffered, she arranged for tutors. When the state of Mississippi proved intransigent, she pulled the levers of power on his behalf, convincing the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to order his admission to the University of Mississippi. When he walked on campus for the first time, she was by his side.
In 1983, Motley returned to the University of Mississippi to tell the story of integration as part of the university’s yearlong celebration of the twentieth anniversary of integration. In her generous telling, Meredith’s story became an object lesson on the power of the federal government to enforce Brown v. Board of Education and achieve racial justice.
To make Meredith v. Fair a parable of Brown’s supremacy, Motley used her speech at the anniversary ceremony to frame the case as the culmination of a long series of Supreme Court rulings. She started with Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that gutted the Fourteenth Amendment and established “separate-but-equal” as the legal justification of segregation. She then narrated the case-by-case process by which the battle to integrate higher education was won. She spoke of Lloyd Gaines, Ada Lois Sipuel, Heman Marion Sweatt, and George. W. McLaurin—the black students who sued to integrate the Universities of Missouri (Gaines), Oklahoma (Sipuel and McLaurin), and Texas (Sweatt). In all three of these cases, in 1938, 1948, and 1950, respectively, the court found for the plaintiffs.77xMissouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 332 U.S. 631 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). “By the time we got to the Meredith case,” Motley concluded, “the legal issues were resolved.”88xConstance Baker Motley, “The Meredith Case: A Test of the Proposition That Federal Law Is Supreme and That a Supreme Court Decision Can Only Be Enforced by the President of the U.S.,” in Law Symposium Proceedings: Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of the Admission of Black Students to the University of Mississippi (1983), 22, University of Mississippi, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Race Relations Collection, Box 1, Folder 33.
Indeed, by the time Motley filed Meredith v. Fair, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was “inherently unequal” and settled the legal questions that had animated each of the previous cases.99xBrown, at 495, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/. In this sense, Motley was right. If the contest in Meredith v. Fair was over the constitutional right to an integrated education—as it was for Gaines, Sipuel and McLaurin, and Sweatt—then the legal issues were indeed settled. Disinclined to revisit settled issues, Motley summarized Meredith in just two sentences:
We filed the suit and of course, if I told you about all the legal wranglings which we went through there, we would be here until at least six o’clock. But the only question at that point really…was whether Mississippi would comply peacefully with the Supreme Court’s mandate.1010xMotley, “The Meredith Case,” 22. (emphases added)
From Motley’s perspective, Brown rendered the actual arguments in Meredith v. Fair inconsequential (nothing more than “legal wrangling”). The only remaining issue was compliance.
To be sure, the integration of the University of Mississippi became a question of compliance. When the legal wrangling was over and Justice Hugo Black finally ordered the district court to grant Meredith the relief he sought, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett took to the airwaves to urge white Mississippians to ignore the order.1111xRoss R. Barnett, “Mississippi Still Says ‘Never!’” The Citizen (September 1962), 7. The response was large and violent—so much so that the word defiance became a shorthand signifier for massive resistance to integration in Mississippi. At Governor Barnett’s urging, the state legislature drafted laws to block Meredith’s enrollment, and judges issued injunctions to the same end. The University of Mississippi’s board of trustees threatened to close the school, and a mob three-thousand–strong converged on the campus to defend segregation with guns, frying pans, and bulldozers. It was defiance on a scale not seen since the Civil War.
But none of it worked. With the help of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—as well as thirty thousand federal troops—Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi on the morning of October 1, 1962. For Motley, the lesson was clear: Mississippi had defied the Supreme Court and lost. Ross Barnett joined Arkansas’s Orval Faubus and Alabama’s George Wallace as one of the southern governors remembered primarily for their dramatic but futile defiance of Brown.1212xConstance Baker Motley, “Violence That Accompanied Desegregation in Mississippi,” Constance Baker Motley Papers, Box 14, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. As Motley later concluded, what Meredith v. Fair really stood for was “the proposition that the federal law is supreme.”1313xMotley, “The Meredith Case,” 22.
A Question of Fact
While Motley was correct that Mississippi tried defiance and lost, Meredith v. Fair was not technically about the supremacy of federal law. Nor was it about the constitutionality of integration. Unlike Gaines, Sipuel, Sweatt, and McLaurin, the case in Meredith v. Fair was restricted to questions of fact. In each of the other cases, the facts were uncontested and the Supreme Court was adjudicating questions of law. In Meredith, the courts were simply trying to determine if James Meredith was denied admission to the University of Mississippi because he was black. No one insisted on this as much as Judge Sidney Mize.
Until Meredith v. Fair was appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial was in the hands of the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, Judge Mize presiding. A friend of Mississippi senator and ardent segregationist James Eastland and, as historian and legal scholar Tomiko Brown-Nagin writes, a “man of the nineteenth century,” Mize sabotaged equal pay for black teachers and denied the legal claims of freedom riders—activists who rode interstate buses into Mississippi and other southern states as a means of challenging the segregation of public accommodations. By the time he heard Meredith v. Fair, he had established himself as a reliable anti–civil rights judge. He bluntly refused to consider Motley’s attempt to frame the case in terms of the supremacy of federal law:
The only question now posed for decision is whether or not the Plaintiff was denied admission to the University of Mississippi solely because of his race or color and only a question of fact appears for determination.1414xMeredith, 202 F.Supp. 224 (S.D. Miss. 1961). (emphases added)
The distinction between Mize and Motley could hardly be sharper. Motley insisted that the “only question” that mattered was compliance with the ruling of the Supreme Court; Mize insisted that the “only question” that mattered was determining if Meredith was denied university admission because of his race.
Judge Mize kept the proceedings narrowly focused on questions of fact. He claimed that Meredith had been rejected because the university was too crowded, because he was transferring from a school that was not properly accredited, and because he could not obtain letters of reference from alumni in his home county.1515xMeredith, 202 F.Supp. (S.D. Miss. 1961). On each count, Mize ruled that because the policies in question were neutral regarding race, Meredith could not claim the protections of Brown v. Board of Education. When Motley accused Mississippi of ignoring Brown, Mize countered that the landmark integration case was “foreign to the issue here.”1616xConstance Baker Motley, Equal Justice Under the Law: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 170. To prove it, he cited Brown in the very opinion in which he ruled against Meredith.1717xMeredith, 202 F.Supp. at 227 (S.D. Miss. 1961).
The citation of Brown by a judge with a record of hostility to civil rights marks an unacknowledged turning point in America’s racial history. As Mize’s track record suggests, his deference to Brown should not imply that the forces of white supremacy were any less committed to the preservation of all-white institutions. Instead, it shows that defenders of white supremacy had taken their fight to a new quarter. When Mize cited Brown, he was not embracing its moral imperative. He was undermining its impact by shifting the debate over integration to a domain in which the ideals of Brown—and the demands of the federal government—held no sway: the realm of facts.
Mize and Motley did not simply disagree on the question of integration. They disagreed on the domain in which the question should be debated. Motley insisted that integration was a question of federal law versus local defiance. Mize posed it as a question of overcrowding, accreditation, and alumni letters of reference. At stake in this dispute was not the validity of Brown v. Board of Education or its moral rightness, but its applicability. Motley insisted that Meredith v. Fair “stemmed” directly from Brown; Mize believed Brown was “foreign to the issue.”1818xConstance Baker Motley, “The Civil Rights Movement and the Law,” Constance Baker Motley Papers, Box 13, Folder vii.c. As Mize left the highway for the thickets, he didn’t defy Brown so much as make it irrelevant.
A Call for Racial Realism
Derrick Bell was distressed by the legal wranglings in Meredith v. Fair. “One of the things that irritated Bell the most,” Motley remembered, was the state’s effort to discredit Meredith for reasons other than race.1919xMotley, Equal Justice Under the Law, 105. Bell himself recalled that he would “watch in wonder” as policies that “everyone knew” were expressly designed to preserve segregation were treated as honest-to-God race-neutral policies that just so happened to exclude black applicants.2020xDerrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 106.
Unlike Motley, Bell came to believe that the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education was entwined with the “legal wranglings” of Meredith v. Fair. But unlike Mize, he never pretended that the posturing over dorms, accreditation, and alumni recommendations was about anything other than race. He saw them not as irrelevant “wranglings” but as a fundamental shift in the strategy of antiblack racism.
Bell was an unlikely critic of Brown. As a young civil rights lawyer, he believed that Brown was “holy writ” and that the decision “was the equivalent of the Holy Grail of racial justice.” In 1962, he joined the Legal Defense Fund, the national nerve center of desegregation law. Often shortened to the “Inc. Fund” or simply the “Fund,” the LDF began as the legal wing of the NAACP before splitting off as an independent entity in 1957. Although the two organizations suffered from well-publicized squabbling, they remained deeply interconnected and, between them, dominated the 1960s push to integrate schools. For a young lawyer with a “romantic infatuation” with Brown, there could hardly be a better place to work. Between 1960 and 1966, Bell spent so much time desegregating schools in Mississippi that he was forced to pay the state’s income tax. When Thurgood Marshall asked him in 1961 to assist Constance Baker Motley in Meredith v. Fair, he jumped at the opportunity. It was “the Lord’s work.”2121xIbid., 2, 97, 106.
But by the 1970s, Bell wondered if he had actually been fighting a “myth.” Mythology—or a collective practice of make-believe—seemed like the only way to describe the bad-faith insistence that overcrowding, accreditation, and alumni letters were racially neutral policies. Citing a study of Meredith v. Fair, he argued that mythology was a critical component of maintaining white supremacy after Brown. Segregation was no longer preserved by the defiance of bigoted politicians but by a form of cultural collusion in which white America pretended that overcrowding policies were race neutral. While Brown could and did beat back the open defiance of Ross Barnett, it was toothless in an “imaginary world” in which everyone pretended that segregation was an incidental outcome rather than a prearranged plan. Brown trumped bigotry, but it had no answer for gaslighting.
Bell called for “racial realism.” Arguing that “society has managed to discriminate against blacks as effectively under the remedy [Brown] as under the prior law,” he pleaded with civil rights lawyers to focus on the historical contexts that made the on-the-ground practice of racial subordination effective.2222xDerrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1992), 104. Bell and Motley’s victory in Meredith v. Fair is a perfect example of racial realism. Where Mize argued that Meredith was rejected because the university was too crowded, realists countered that it subsequently admitted another four hundred white students. Where Mize argued that Meredith had transferred from an unaccredited school, realists noted that the accreditation policy was enacted six days after Meredith applied.2323xMeredith v. Fair, 305 F.2d at 347, 353 (5th Cir. 1962). And while Mize argued that Meredith did not obtain references from alumni, realists noted that the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia had already found the requirement for alumni testimonials to be unconstitutional.2424xHunt v. Arnold, 172 F.Supp. 847 (N.D. Ga. 1959), https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/172/847/2091901/. In each case, James Meredith’s legal team addressed the thickets of misdirection by exposing supposedly race-neutral policies as deeply—and intentionally—implicated in the preservation of segregation. If Brown was designed to stop the open defiance of Barnett, racial realism was built for the thickets. It was designed to prevent the “incidental” racial impacts of policies that escaped the jurisdiction of Brown by feigning neutrality.
Bell’s disenchantment with Brown peaked with his experience with the Hudson sisters. He was in Jackson, Mississippi, working on the Meredith case, when Motley introduced him to NAACP activists Winson and Dovie Hudson, who were seeking help to reopen their beloved all-black school in the rural community of Harmony, in Leake County, which had been closed by the white school board. Bell declined to help them. He explained that his mission—and that of the LDF—was not to save segregated schools but to eliminate them.2525xThe NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund’s umbrella organization until 1957, was so committed to integration that it refused to settle litigation in exchange for promises of better black schools. See Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85, no. 3 (1976), 476. When the sisters changed course and agreed to pursue integration, Bell filed Hudson v. Leake County School Board,2626xHudson v. Leake County School Board, Civ. No. 3382 (S.D. Miss. 1963). and he won.
Bell’s experience with the Hudson sisters haunted him. More than any of his desegregation cases from the 1960s—and there were hundreds—he continually returned to Hudson v. Leake to explain how he lost his faith in Brown. Although the sisters asked for what was called equalization—they wanted their all-black school back—Bell was so captivated by Brown that he could not hear their desires. The sisters, he explained, had not been “exposed to an adversary discussion on the subject” and could not be expected to know what was best for their own community. When they asked for an equalized black school, Bell believed that they were settling for something less than full receipt of rights to which they were entitled.2727xBell, “Serving Two Masters,” 477. He couldn’t see past Brown.
Bell lived to regret it. Although he won Hudson v. Leake, integration in Harmony came at a price. The Leake County residents who petitioned for integration lost jobs, saw their houses shot up by night riders, and had their credit cut off by merchants. A school board member promised that the blood of black children would run in the streets before Leake County public schools would be integrated.2828xWinson Hudson, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 57. Winson Hudson’s home was firebombed; Dovie Hudson’s was bombed twice.2929xJelani Cobb, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2023. In the end, only thirteen people signed a petition to integrate Leake County schools, and only one black student—Debra Lewis—was willing to enroll. Debra’s father lost his job the first day of school. And although Debra graduated from Leake County High School, the costs to the community stopped Bell in his tracks.
Although Bell won Meredith v. Fair and Hudson v. Leake, he came to regard both as lessons on the limitations of Brown. The Hudson sisters showed him the costs of insisting on integration. And Meredith showed him that the protections of Brown were no longer the key to integration. After all, Mize could cite Brown as he kept Ole Miss segregated. In 1976, in a Yale Law Journal article titled “Serving Two Masters,” Bell made his experience with the Hudson sisters and James Meredith the foundation of a field-shaking critique of civil rights law.3030xOn the claim that “Serving Two Masters” was inspired by Meredith v. Fair, see Sherick Hughes, George Noblit, and Darrell Cleveland, “Derrick Bell’s Post-Brown Moves Toward Critical Race Theory,” Race Ethnicity and Education 16, no. 4 (2013): 442–69, doi: 10.1080/13613324.2013.817765. He accused civil rights lawyers—himself included—of being so enchanted by Brown that they ignored the desires of clients and were blind to the ever-changing strategies to uphold white supremacy. As he looked back on his experience with the Hudsons and Meredith, Bell concluded that the “the time has come for civil rights lawyers to end their single-minded commitment to racial balance.”3131xBell, “Serving Two Masters,” 516. Brown had run its course, not because integration was no longer a legal right but because antiblack racism had adapted. Segregationists now took Brown in stride, even citing it for their purposes—above all, to make sure that the “bottom rail” stayed on bottom. Seldom, Bell concluded, had a decision “promised so much” but “accomplished so little.”3232xBell, Silent Covenants, 2.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of “Serving Two Masters.” Civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues have called it the “intellectual starting point of Critical Race Theory.”3333xKimberlé Crenshaw et al., “Intellectual Precursors: Early Critique of Conventional Civil Rights Discourse,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York, NY: New Press, 1995), 2. Although it would be thirteen more years until the fateful words “critical race theory” were first uttered at a University of Wisconsin retreat, ideas that would in time animate CRT were hatched in Bell’s experience as a Fund lawyer in the early 1960s. In Meredith v. Fair, Bell experienced what legal scholar and activist Mari Matsuda calls the “falsity of the liberal promise.”3434xMari Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” in Critical Race Theory, ed. Crenshaw et al., 63. He saw firsthand how the storied rights of liberalism—such as those protected by Brown—are a paltry form of protection against the destructive but “incidental” racial impacts of colorblind policies. Indeed, the Brown-citing segregationist judge in Meredith v. Fair is a powerful reminder that formal equality under the law is no guarantee of substantive equality in real life.3535xDerrick Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Aspen, 2000), 137. And although CRT sprang from many sources, its largest taproot may well have been Bell’s racial realism.3636xJelani Cobb, “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” and Hughes et al., “Derrick Bell’s Post-Brown Moves.”
Brown won on the open highway and was for this reason the crowning achievement of the earlier era. And while Motley reminds us that we should never stop celebrating it as a landmark decision in American history, Bell reminds us that Brown left James Meredith vulnerable to a politics of colorblind racism. In a world in which white supremacy is maintained by Brown-citing judges—and communities suffer even as they are legally victorious—the constitutional protections of Brown need to be supplemented by the realism of CRT. With its focus on the on-the-ground mechanisms of oppression, Bell believed that CRT had the potential to deliver the ideals to which Brown could only aspire.