In Chap­ter Twen­ty-Four, “Amer­i­ca,” set dur­ing the 1950s amid the Cold War, the nar­ra­tive explores the trou­bling rela­tion­ship between Amer­i­ca’s racial seg­re­ga­tion laws and their Nazi coun­ter­parts. The chap­ter empha­sizes how Hitler drew inspi­ra­tion from the sys­temic dis­crim­i­na­tion present in the Unit­ed States, par­tic­u­lar­ly the racial seg­re­ga­tion laws in the South. Despite Amer­i­ca being a bur­geon­ing super­pow­er, it con­tin­ued to oppress Black cit­i­zens, as exem­pli­fied in the life of Claudette, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the con­text of the Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion cas­es aimed at chal­leng­ing the doc­trine of “sep­a­rate but equal.”

The chap­ter recounts the sto­ry of Oliv­er Brown, who attempt­ed to enroll his daugh­ter, Lin­da, in a white ele­men­tary school but was denied due to exist­ing seg­re­ga­tion laws. His actions laid the ground­work for the land­mark Supreme Court case, in which Thur­good Mar­shall rep­re­sent­ed mul­ti­ple cas­es chal­leng­ing seg­re­ga­tion in edu­ca­tion. The nar­ra­tive high­lights Earl War­ren’s sig­nif­i­cant role as the new­ly appoint­ed Chief Jus­tice, who sought a strong unan­i­mous rul­ing to effec­tive­ly counter seg­re­ga­tion­ist sen­ti­ments.

Warren’s back­ground as a pros­e­cu­tor with a his­to­ry of tack­ling cor­rup­tion and his con­tentious polit­i­cal jour­ney, includ­ing his thoughts on Japan­ese Amer­i­can intern­ment dur­ing WWII, frames the con­text for the court’s delib­er­a­tions. The chap­ter details the buildup to the piv­otal moment when the Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly declared that school seg­re­ga­tion was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, acknowl­edg­ing the inher­ent inequal­i­ty in “sep­a­rate but equal.”

How­ev­er, the chap­ter also cap­tures the back­lash from var­i­ous seg­ments of white soci­ety who believed school inte­gra­tion threat­ened their moral norms and soci­etal struc­ture. The phrase “with all delib­er­ate speed,” which emerged from the fol­low-up rul­ing, intend­ed to con­vey urgency in inte­grat­ing schools, but was twist­ed by seg­re­ga­tion­ists to mean a slow, drawn-out process. This led to fur­ther resis­tance, with some states enact­ing laws to obstruct inte­gra­tion or even opt­ing to close schools entire­ly.

Thus, the chap­ter brings to light the com­plex­i­ties and the fierce resis­tance faced dur­ing a crit­i­cal peri­od in the fight for civ­il rights, under­scor­ing both the achieve­ments and the ongo­ing chal­lenges in the pur­suit of equal­i­ty in Amer­i­ca.