Brown as a Cold War Case

United States Supreme Court has given a new definition to unAmericanism, Roscoe Drummond wrote in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune on May 21, 1954, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. It has ruled that segregated public schools are un-Constitutional—and therefore un-American. The Brown decision was timely, he argued, because it comes at a moment when our leadership of the free peoples demands the best ... of what America is and can be. Drummond was not alone in calling segregation unAmerican. When the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education, whose policies were before the Court in Brown, voted to abandon segregation before the Supreme Court ruling came down, a board member commented, We feel that segregation is not an American practice. By 1954 many Americans had come to that conclusion about segregation, a widely practiced American institution. 1 1