Today, the Census Bureau reports, the share of all African-American adults holding high school degrees (85 percent) nearly equals the share of whites (89 percent) blacks have slightly passed whites on that measure among young adults ages 25 to 29.īefore Brown, only about one in 40 African-Americans earned a college degree. Just before Brown, only about one in seven African-Americans, compared with more than one in three whites, held a high school degree. " Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission-to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today," Richard Rothstein, a veteran liberal educational analyst, declared in a paper this month. Ferguson decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren's ringing opinion in Brown was the belated midcourse correction that began America's transformation into a truly multiracial world nation.īut a distinct note of disenchantment is surfacing as scholars and advocates assess Brown's legacy. Although its mandate to dismantle segregated public schools initially faced "massive resistance" across the South, the ruling provided irresistible moral authority to the drive for legal equality that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts a decade later.Ĭoming nearly 60 years after the Supreme Court had upheld segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. The unanimous 1954 Brown decision was a genuine hinge in American history. That demographic transformation is both reinvigorating and reframing Brown's fundamental goal of ensuring educational opportunity for all Americans. The second watershed will follow in June, with the completion of what is likely to be the last school year ever in which a majority of America's K-12 public-school students are white.
Board of Education decision striking down "separate but equal" segregation in public education.
The first landmark moment will arrive May 17, with the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. The second is reshaping the legacy of the first. Two milestones in the history of American education are converging this spring.
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