On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Nathan Newman wrote:
A lot of excellent points tending to disprove the idea that _Brown vs. Board of Education_ was the spark that set off civil rights movement. To make a long story short, it didn't make a big impression in contemporary black culture or consciousness and the periodization of the movement doesn't show any alignment with the decision. The real spark of the movement, if we have to give a single one, would be WWII and its aftershocks.
I'd like to add to that (or rather reinforce a point Nathan made in passing) which is that what Brown did map perfectly onto was a massive Southern resistance movement, which was explicitly in reaction to Brown, spread like wildfire, and almost overnight transformed Southern states that had been relatively moderate on racial policy into medieval strongholds (like Arkansas). Rick Perlstein has some good passages on this in his book _Before the Storm_ (see for example p. 14). The seminal work if you want to read about it in depth is Numan Bartley's aptly named _The Rise of Massive Resistance_: Race and Politics in the South of the 1950s_.
Michael