Law and Social Change: Catalyst for Leadership

Abstract

Douglas Wilder, the first African American elected black governor of Virginia (1990-1994), was a recent veteran of the Korean War when the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision was announced in 1954. Returning to the United States only a few months before, he had “literally given up on what they called ‘the system.”’ He had fought in a war for other peoples’ freedom but came back to a country in which his own sense of opportunity and self-determination was severely curtailed by race. He was demoralized and disillusioned.

And when Brown v. Board of Education came down I said, “God have mercy the system works! You mean nine white men have said that they were wrong? I’m in the wrong field! I better get into law, I better get into something of this social engineering.” So it literally turned my life around. … Brown v. Board of Education was sort of like a rebirth for me.²

Brown … became immediately an icon, a symbol, of America’s commitment to justice, to racial justice and to being the best of a multiracial democracy … Brown stands for more than just segregation or desegregation. …[W]e made a commitment as Americans that we were going to change and that’s what Brown signaled.¹—Mary Frances Berry