Reading Charles Black Writing: “The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions” Revisited

The year 2010 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charles L. Black, Jr.’s “The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions.” Professor Black’s magisterial essay on the Supreme Court’s 1954-1955 decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and its companion cases is, by any account, a foundational text in the scholarly literature on race and law in the U.S. Black’s short but searing defense of Brown introduced ideas and arguments about race, about law, and about the law of race that transformed the field. I can think of no better way to celebrate this inaugural issue of the Columbia Journal of Race and Law than to revisit “The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions,” and to highlight the continuing significance, a half century later, of Charles Black’s intellectual preoccupations and practice for the project to which the Editors of this Journal have devoted its pages: the critical study of race and law. No PDF is available for this article.