Thanks to the civil rights revolution, de jure segregation is dead. But vast social, economic and educational inequalities continue to plague American society. Moreover, while the black-white paradigm has never fully described American race relations, we are far more aware today than in the past of the multiracial nature of our society. With this in mind, we asked a range of scholars, writers and activists to reflect on the legacy of Brown and the prospects for future change. Should education be the primary focus of social activism? What strategies will most effectively promote educational betterment in black and other communities? Can we expect the courts to play a role at the forefront of change, as they did for much of the 1950s and '60s, and if not, what other institutions are positioned to adopt that role? Is the goal of educational desegregation irrelevant today? Their responses follow.    --The Editors

Jacquelyn D. Hall

A monumental victory when it first appeared, the Brown decision now threatens to become a bulwark of inequality. The glory of Brown was its ringing endorsement of educational equality and its understanding that--in the face of centuries of forced segregation, economic exploitation and cultural denigration--separate could never be equal. It is not the decision itself but the way we remembered it that has gone wrong, for a flawed "master narrative" prevents Brown from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time. That narrative confines the civil rights movement to the years between the Supreme Court decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and to the goal of formal equality before the law. This truncated story line makes it all too easy for conservatives to misappropriate the Brown decision as a triumph for colorblindness and use it to reify a legal fiction that draws a sharp line between de jure and de facto segregation.

Nineteen fifty-four was a pivotal moment in a long civil rights movement, whose goals went far beyond ending de jure segregation. This nationwide struggle was rooted in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, emerged decisively with the great migration of blacks to the cities during World War II and continued through the 1970s, when civil rights advocates fought to make use of the gains they had won.

A black-union-left coalition led the movement in the 1940s. Pursuing a social democratic vision in which political, social and economic rights were fused, it won landmark victories, including mass unionization, the desegregation of higher education, fair employment and open housing laws. On the other side stood a Congressional alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans, along with the first generation of "suburban warriors," who were encouraged by government policies and profit-hungry real estate companies to shut out black homeowners and devise student assignment plans that deepened segregation in the North and West. The cold war gave the civil rights movement's enemies a devastating weapon: a red scare that equated social provisions with socialism, severed civil rights from economic justice and narrowed the political discourse on which later activists could draw.

When the movement re-emerged in the mid-1950s, it struck at the racial order's Achilles' heel: state-mandated apartheid in theSouth. Combining moral force with strategic brilliance, it enlisted the Supreme Court, forced the hand of the federal government and brought local opponents to their knees. But physical separation was never white supremacy's major goal. Segregation insured racial hierarchy and a cheap, undereducated, politically demobilized and racially divided labor supply. This system of "racial capitalism" deprived blacks and many poor whites not only of civil rights but of social and economic citizenship as well.

By the time the legal edifice of segregation crumbled, moreover, state-subsidized suburbanization had already spatialized race, blurring the line between de jure and de facto segregation in both the South and the North. For that reason, farsighted civil rights activists fought against what has now become judicial principle: the assumption that only recent, intentional, provable, state-sponsored segregation is actionable at law--an assumption that does not necessarily flow from Brown and that flies in the face of history, but has now been enshrined by the courts.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, civil rights activists returned to the economic issues of the 1930s and '40s. At the same time, a combination of court oversight and grassroots pressure gave the South the most integrated school system in the country. Too often desegregation was a cultural one-way street, in which black teachers were fired and cherished black institutions were destroyed. Yet interviews conducted by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina suggest that for many students in the 1970s, the experience was life-changing in ways that cannot be captured by the statistical studies on which judgments about the success or failure of integration too often rely.

We now face a situation in which the federal courts are preventing local communities from pursuing race-conscious policies, while segregated housing remains deeply entrenched. The result will be two school systems: one filled with nonwhite children from low-income families and one with middle-class children, most of whom are white, along with our most qualified teachers.

We cannot address this crisis by commemorating the Brown decision in the register either of triumph or declension. Instead, we must grapple with the long civil rights movement as an unfinished revolution whose gains are once again being partially reversed. The culprit now, as in the past, is not just overt racism but public policies that are ostensibly colorblind, yet deliberately shape the landscape of race. We need stories that dramatize that hidden reality, stories that have no satisfying upward or downward arc, stories that call us to a struggle whose end is still not in sight.

---

Jacquelyn D. Hall, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, is director of the Southern Oral History Program. She is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

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