Thanks to the civil rights revolution, de jure segregation is dead. But vast social, economic and educational inequalities continue to plague American society. Moreover, while the black-white paradigm has never fully described American race relations, we are far more aware today than in the past of the multiracial nature of our society. With this in mind, we asked a range of scholars, writers and activists to reflect on the legacy of Brown and the prospects for future change. Should education be the primary focus of social activism? What strategies will most effectively promote educational betterment in black and other communities? Can we expect the courts to play a role at the forefront of change, as they did for much of the 1950s and '60s, and if not, what other institutions are positioned to adopt that role? Is the goal of educational desegregation irrelevant today? Their responses follow.    --The Editors

Patricia Sullivan

Brown v. Board of Education stands as a high-water mark in the modern civil rights movement. It represents the triumph of an improvisational legal campaign that joined a hard-edged litigation strategy with a twenty-year-long organizing effort throughout the South. NAACP lawyers and activists recruited plaintiffs, cultivated local support and helped lay the groundwork for a protracted challenge to racial segregation. Schools and education were at the center of the campaign. Charles Houston, the architect of this effort, warned that blacks would be subject to even greater oppression unless they continually fought for "identical quality and quantity of educational opportunity [for] all citizens regardless of race, creed, or color."

In May 1954 the Supreme Court concurred with the arguments put forward by NAACP counsel. "It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education," the Court held. "Such an opportunity...is a right which must be available to all on equal terms." The Court further ruled that "separate educational facilities" are "inherently unequal." Brown ushered in a decade of protest that succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow. Effective school desegregation, however, would not begin in the South until the late 1960s.

In the aftermath of the Brown ruling, NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter, who argued three of the cases making up Brown, took the legal campaign for school desegregation north. By then, half of African-Americans lived outside the South, and the vast majority attended segregated schools. During the 1960s Carter and his associates worked to establish that whenever school assignment policies or organization produced inferior education of black children, whether intentional or not, it was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's mandate that black children receive equal educational opportunity. The Court refused to support such an expansive reading of Brown. A relatively brief experiment with court-ordered busing in the 1970s to correct intentional segregation advanced the desegregation process in selected areas. But white flight, along with federal policies and court rulings, narrowed the application of this strategy, and the Supreme Court ultimately lifted these orders and ruled that race-conscious remedies themselves were unconstitutional.

In 2004 the profile of educational opportunity for a significant segment of African-American children mirrors the pre-Brown era. Predominantly black and minority schools are most often housed in crumbling facilities, suffer from starved budgets and lack essential resources. The persistence of racial inequality--as measured by income, joblessness and underemployment, and rates of incarceration--is closely linked to an educational system that barely functions for a large number of black children and fails to address the needs of many more.

Although Brown has not achieved its primary purpose--to guarantee equal educational opportunity for all African-American children--its mandate is written into law and history and continues to shape the struggle for racial and social justice. Innovative leadership committed to the long haul has been the hallmark of past efforts and continues to be essential. Among hopeful developments are the growing efforts to "fix the schools" in poor neighborhoods and create quality education where children live. School equalization suits seek an opening toward this end, along with experimental schools and programs anchored in the communities they are designed to serve.

The Algebra Project, founded and directed by civil rights activist Robert Moses, offers a compelling model for ways of engaging communities in the transformation of their schools and providing children with access to math literacy, a fundamental tool for full participation in contemporary society. Moses traces a direct link between the struggle for equal education today and the civil rights struggles of the past. Reforms will do little to promote structural change, he explains, without an ongoing effort to empower the affected communities "to demand access to literacy for everyone." This, in the end, is Brown's most enduring legacy.

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Patricia Sullivan teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author, most recently, of Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters From the Civil Rights Years (Routledge).

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