New York Justice Leland DeGrasse's January 10 ruling that the state was illegally underfunding New York City's public schools made the front pages. DeGrasse declared that the state financing system was depriving city students of the "sound, basic education" required by the state Constitution and was violating US Department of Education regulations implementing Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately hurting minority students. Proclaiming that "the amount of melanin in a student's skin," his or her country of national origin or amount of family wealth should not be "inexorable determinants of academic success," the judge gave the state until September 15 to come up with a remedy or face judicial intervention.

By now, civil rights advocates have read such fine-sounding judicial opinions, along with the dreadful ones, many times before--more than forty-six years having gone by since the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. In fact, one would expect that civil rights supporters and especially the parents of poor children trapped in crumbling, barely functional schools would be infuriated by the continuing need for such decisions and the knowledge that implementation may be years or generations away. Justice DeGrasse has issued the best possible decision he could in light of prior restrictive decisions by both the US Supreme Court and New York State's highest court. Yet like many states--including Texas, New Jersey, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Montana and Alabama--where courts have finally faced up to pathetically underfinanced public schools, progress is rarely made until judges prove willing to enforce their fine words with ironclad orders. To understand why our public schools are still so segregated, and why those attended by mostly poor African-Americans and Latinos are so underfinanced, we must travel back in time to the Brown decision and its progeny.

Much of the story of Brown v. Board of Education and its aftermath is familiar, of course, and has been told before in books, complete with anecdotes about many of the key figures involved, including the chief counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thurgood Marshall. These works include Richard Kluger's Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality; Constance Baker Motley's autobiographical Equal Justice Under Law; Jack Greenberg's Crusaders in the Courts; and Juan Williams's Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. Now we have--virtually simultaneously--yet another court decision showing the painful legacy of the case and James T. Patterson's retelling of it, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy.

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