Towards a Post- Brown life course framework

Abstract

Gerontological research on racial desegregation in U.S. schools and late-life cognition among older Black adults generally finds that desegregation is associated with improved cognitive outcomes. However, this scholarship omits two historically documented forces that shaped the post-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) landscape: (1) segregationist pushback, the institutional policies and systematic responses that directly undermined desegregation (e.g., mass displacement of Black educators, expansion of school policing in newly integrated schools), and (2) Black autonomy, the traditions of organizing and resistance through which Black communities have exercised agency within and against imposed racial structures (e.g., community mobilization, educational advocacy). This conceptual article introduces the Post-Brown Life Course Framework (PBLCF), which integrates legal and historical scholarship on desegregation’s consequences with life course health research to reframe the desegregation-cognition relation. The PBLCF centers segregationist pushback and Black autonomy as its two core analytical constructs, positioning them as explanatory mechanisms and effect modifiers that mediate and moderate the pathway from early-life educational experiences to late-life cognition. The framework is illustrated through two worked examples: one tracing a segregationist pushback pathway through school policing and criminal legal system involvement, and one tracing a Black autonomy pathway through community organizing and improved health care access. Substantive, methodological, and theoretical implications are discussed, with particular attention to improving model specification in gerontological research and informing equitable health policy across the life course.