Klarman has compressed his study of the Supreme Court's rulings on race into a tight foucs around one major case--Brown v. Board of Education. Klarman goes behind the scenes to examine the justices' deliberations and recaps his famous backlash thesis, arguing that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to change than for encouraging civil rights protest and that it was the resulting violence that transformed northern opinion and led to the landmark legislation of the 1960s. Klarman also sheds light on broader questions such as how racial attitudes change over time; how much judicial decisions depend on legal, political, and peronal considerations; and the realtionship between Supreme Court decisions and social change.

Citation
Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement: Abridged Edition of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, Oxford University Press (2007).