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August 6, 2003

Media Contact: Barry Jagoda, (858) 534-8567

BOOK TRACING HISTORY OF RACISM IN SCHOOLS WINS TOP AWARD

“Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision,” a powerful and disturbing work chronicling the history of segregated schools in America, has been selected as outstanding book of the year by the American Bar Association. The author, University of California, San Diego Professor Peter Irons, will receive the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award at the San Francisco award ceremony on August 10. The award is bestowed annually to the book that best fosters “public understanding of law and the legal system.”

In this compelling, and sobering, history, Irons, a constitutional law scholar and member of the UCSD Political Science Department faculty, explores the 150-year struggle against Jim Crow, or segregated, schools. Much of the book focuses on the long and protracted legal fight following World War II, which culminated in the series of 1954 Supreme Court decisions —known as Brown vs. Board of Education—which decreed that separate schools were inherently unequal.

In his book, Irons brings the story down to the present day in what becomes an indictment of continued racism in the half-century since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Citing educational achievement statistics and his own extensive on-scene interviews with students at schools today that were among the landmark centers of legal struggle 50 years ago, Irons reaches the sad conclusion that the effort to integrate the schools has been a failure in terms of the quality of education available to young blacks.

Irons, a graduate of Harvard Law School, earned his Ph.D in political science at Boston University. His award-winning books include Justice at War and The Courage of their Convictions, as well as numerous other works on civil rights and the law. Irons is Director of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project at the University of California, San Diego.