>Here Leo misses or at least downplays the point I was making, which was I
>argued that the Warren Court might have been more radical if it had not
>overturned Plessy - an act of judicial restraint by an earlier Court in
that
>it upheld segregation laws in the states - but had rather overturned the
>precedent of the Civil Rights Cases, which were acts of extreme judicial
>activism.
((((((((
CB: Probably, but did the lawyers who framed _Brown_ make the Civil Rights Cases at issue ?
Hey, the Supreme Court has ruled on issues that the plaintiffs have not raised in major cases; I am not saying that it is likely that the Warren Court would have done so (especially since it failed to overrule them when offered the opportunity to do so in the 1960s), just that the turn by the Warren Court to judicial activism was not necessarily the most progressive alternative.
In fact, the problem may have been that the legal progressives like the NAACP (for some good reasons given the Southern Democratic hold on Congress) built a strategy around putting faith in the Supreme Court. Because of this, the NAACP often attacked more radical mobilizations for fear that the judicial elite the NAACP was looking to intervene would back away. The dependence on elite opinion build into legal struggles is one of the worst problems in vesting hope in the Supreme Court, since it makes mass movements hostage to liberal elite opinion.
Now, Brown was so psychologically important that it's hard to argue with it, but putting Brown aside, it's hard to argue that the Court delivered much directly beyond that psychology. Far more important for the movement were the Bill of Rights cases that protected democratic mobilization.
-- Nathan Newman