50 years later, Brown disappointments

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered racial integration of public schools in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, middle-class flight has resegregated most big-city public-school systems.

“Why are we not all joyfully dancing, celebrating our collective release from the bondage of prejudice and inequality?” asks Ellis Cose in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation about the results a half-century after the court ruled that state-enforced racial separation in public facilities was unconstitutional.

“The answer is simple: Brown, for all its glory, is something of a bust,” concludes the report titled “Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education.”

A major reason for the “bittersweet” celebration of the 1954 case that “wrestled American apartheid to the mat,” Mr. Cose says, is the huge academic achievement gap between white and minority students, which Education Secretary Rod Paige calls the country’s new civil rights crisis.

“It’s clear that after 50 years, we still have a lot of work to do,” Mr. Paige said last week at a forum at the Cato Institute to commemorate the landmark decision.

“Today, only one in six African-Americans can read proficiently upon leaving high school. The achievement gap in reading between blacks and whites is staggering. Nationally, it’s 28 percentage points at the fourth-grade level at or above proficient, and in the District of Columbia, it is more than double that,” the secretary said.

According to the latest fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 60 percent of black students and 56 percent of Hispanics are “below basic” — meaning that those students cannot read and understand basic reading material at their grade level. For Asians, it was 30 percent “below basic,” and for whites, it was 25 percent.

Mr. Paige noted, moreover, that black students, per capita, have almost three times more disciplinary problems than whites in kindergarten through 12th grade, as measured by suspensions, and earn proportionally about half the number of college degrees as whites do.

Nonetheless, Mr. Paige said the Brown decision was historic beyond the plain words spoken from the bench by Chief Justice Earl Warren: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Those words did much more than end state-mandated segregation, but “began a process of healing in America, still needed almost 100 years after the Civil War,” Mr. Paige told a Harvard University audience in April.

“The Brown decision affirmed the constitutional promise of equality and justice for all Americans. It set this country on a new course, affirming civil and human rights while demanding the full respect and protection of the law for all people.”

‘Massive resistance’

But the pace of change was much slower than predicted by Thurgood Marshall, the top lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who argued the Brown case. He said school segregation would perish within five years of the decision and predicted that by 1963, “all forms of segregation in America would be nothing but a memory,” recalled the Cose report.

“Massive resistance” in defiance of the decision, particularly in the 11 states of the Confederacy, continued “well into the 1970s,” said Mr. Paige, who grew up in rural Mississippi.

Lower courts would not enforce the decision.

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