“Wait a Minute … I’m a White”

Abstract

On May 31, 1955, a little more than a year after the Brown ruling, the Supreme Court in Brown II turned down the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s request for immediate and complete school desegregation in favor of a more gradual approach. The Warren Court delegated the task of deciding the pace of desegregation to local federal judges, requiring only that “a prompt and reasonable start” to desegregation begin “with all deliberate speed.” In the nation, in North Carolina, and in Camden, this ruling resulted in what Peter Irons in Jim Crow’s Children (2002) called, “too much deliberation and not enough speed.”¹