Reply #104: Brown v. Board of Education wasn't incremental change? REALLY?

[BzaDem]

You have NO CLUE what you are talking about. NONE.

Brown vs. Board of Education and its progeny are perhaps one of the greatest examples of how incremental steps bring about change in ways that sweeping steps don't. The road to Brown vs. Board of Education was carefully crafted by the NAACP and other civil rights lawyers for DECADES. They started in earnest in 1935, and thought it strategically prudent to start with law schools. After all, white laywers and judges clearly knew the extent of the inequality of law school accommodations among the races

They started by challenging separate but clearly unequal law schools, and established precedent requiring their equalization. They gradually moved towards demanding that black students be admitted to white law schools after showing that equalization was failing and impossible. All along the way, they incrementally established major Supreme Court precedents (such as Sweatt v. Painter) that could later be used to strike down segregation as a concept altogether. They also established a multi-decade factual record of how equalizing never happens.

Finally, in 1954, armed with evidence and precedent borne out of the prevoius 20 years, they challenged public school segregation head-on as inherrently unequal (even if the accomodations could be considered equal in and of themselves). They were able to win because the precedents they helped craft in their long hard fight lead inexorably to that conclusion.

What would have happened if they went straight for "transformative" change in 1935, and challenged segregation head-on then? The Supreme Court most likely would have issed a unanimous decision affirming Plessy vs. Ferguson, which would have set back the fight against segregation for a generation or more.

And you are the one telling me that I am advancing failed arguments. What a joke. I would open a history book and read a few pages before you decide which of us is actually spouting failed arguments. In the future, if you are trying to cite an example of "transformative change," make sure you don't accidentally cite one of the biggest incremental and long-fought battles of the century.