The Short Legacy of Brown

When Linda Brown died at age 76 last week, it marked 64 years since her central role in her dad's case against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In the three decades that followed the Brown decision, schools in the U.S. became increasingly integrated, achieving a high in 1988, when 45 percent of African-American students attended majority-white schools.

Then came the '90s, and the courts' quiet but rapid reversal of that progress. Oklahoma City was allowed to revert to neighborhood schools (a quiet name for segregated schools). The Supreme Court set a goal of local control (a quiet name for the racial divide). By the beginning of the 21st century, schools were described as "resegregating" by a project at Harvard, and in a 2007 Seattle and Louisville case that I noted at the time, the Supreme Court narrowly found that schools could not assign students to schools on the basis of race. School integration was effectively killed, 53 years after Brown. Today it is estimated that school segregation is equivalent to what it was in 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed.

When I was a kid, there were a couple of things that seemed to guarantee a sort of equity across households in America. One was Brown and the guarantee of a sound, basic education in our public schools. The other was the half-hour evening newscast on the big three TV channels, which gave everyone who watched the same general view of the world.

What are our sources of equity today? Fast food, Facebook, and TV sports?