Title: How, after 60 years, Brown v. Board of Education succeeded — and didn’t - The Washington Post
Headings: How, after 60 years, Brown v. Board of Education succeeded — and didn’t
How, after 60 years, Brown v. Board of Education succeeded — and didn’t
Brown and desegregation
Black student achievement and the achievement gap
Resource equality is not enough
Integration remains essential
Segregated neighborhoods lead to segregated schools
About the author
Endnotes

Content: Its narrow result was to annihilate the “separate but equal” rule, previously sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1896, that permitted states and school districts to designate some schools for “whites-only” and others for “Negroes-only.” 1
But more important, the Brown decision focused the nation’s attention on black subjugation in a fashion not seen since Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the South after the Civil War. Brown’s 1954 success in highlighting the nation’s racial caste system gave encouragement to a wave of freedom rides to desegregate interstate transportation, to national support for Rosa Parks’ determination to desegregate local buses and other public facilities, to lunch counter sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and other public accommodations, to heroic efforts to register African Americans in the Deep South to vote, and to confrontations over admission of African Americans to southern universities. It also spurred civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965, and 1968 that, in combination, undid the nation’s legal support for race-based status. None of this would have taken place without Brown. 2
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But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission—to undo the school segregation that persists as a modal characteristic of American public education today. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on May 17, 1954, Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and chief attorney for the plaintiffs, predicted that there would be “no organized resistance” to the Supreme Court’s order and that schools nationwide would be fully desegregated “in up to five years,” ensuring that black children throughout the nation would have educations that would gain them entry to skilled jobs and colleges on an equal basis with whites. 3
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court where he spent the next 24 years in a fruitless struggle to prevent the perpetuation of school segregation, and indeed its exacerbation, after an initial rollback. Today, things are getting worse. The typical black student now attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980.