ABSTRACT
The connections between Brown v. Board of Education and the Cold War are so ubiquitous in the primary sources that it is more difficult to explain them away than to find a place for them in the historical narrative. Historians and legal scholars might raise important objections to the Cold War narrative of Brown. By drawing attention to the impact of Brown on US foreign relations, an international frame might seem to take the story out of the streets and local communities where school desegregation struggles played out and to encourage an outdated, top-down approach to writing history. Although Brown is still held up as a high point in American legal history, the case ultimately came under assault. In a 2001 collection of essays in which prominent legal scholars rewrote the Court s opinion, Derrick Bell wrote a dissent, arguing that in Brown the Court overestimated the power of law to achieve social change and underestimated the pervasiveness of racism.
