In the spring of 1954, almost simultaneously, two events occurred that would shape the domestic and foreign politics of America for the rest of the century. On May 7, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the Viet Minh, signaling the end of a century of French colonial rule in Indochina. Just ten days later, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in the nation's public schools to be unconstitutional.

The French debacle in Indochina precipitated America's entry into a disastrous war that would leave hundreds of thousands of Asians and Americans dead, and would poison domestic politics for a generation. The unanimous ruling in Brown, one of the two or three most important judicial decisions of the twentieth Century, fundamentally changed the legal and ethical premises on which American society had proceeded.

Pearl commented on both of these epochal events at some length in a letter to her old friend Emma White. In the wake of the Brown decision, Emma had asked Pearl to sympathize with the white South, which found itself suddenly disoriented. Pearl had no patience and no stomach for euphemism, even with an old friend. “The present situation,” she wrote, “is a sort of retribution for the long delay in doing anything at all about segregation.” The South would eventually learn what modern science had long known, she told Emma, that no race is inherently more intelligent or talented than another.