Brown v. Board: The education of a nation

“Conservatives have abandoned the public schools,” Wilkins said. “Among conservatives, there's this determined assault on public enterprises: Medicare, Social Security and public education. The result is we have a decreased support for public education generally.”

Not just education, but edifice
One problem Wilkins alluded to has less to do with the racial composition of schools than with their condition — the literal infrastructure of the buildings themselves.

Free video S.C. town still struggles with Brown decision May 17, 2004: One case that was part of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was based in South Carolina. Fifty years later, what's changed? NBC's Don Teague examines. Nightly News

Reports from the U.S. Department of Education and the General Accounting Office found that older buildings sometimes lack adequate electrical and telecom wiring.

That problem's made worse by growing demand for new school construction, and school districts' frustrated efforts at fiscal triage — deciding how to spend less and less money on facilities that need more and more work.

Add to those challenges the impact of overcrowding. Spikes in enrollment due to the “baby-boom echo,“ immigration and the rise in the native-born U.S. minority population mean that many schools enroll a lot more students than it's possible to accommodate, the two agencies determined.

“Public schools that should be the rock bottom of a democracy of people able to discuss issues and make informed judgments are withering,” Wilkins said. “There's no national consensus to fix it, just a consensus to diddle around the edges.”

Some lament slow progress
For Tyler Stovall, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and author of “Paris Noir,” a 1996 study of black expatriates, progress in America since Brown has been discouragingly slow. 

“In my view, over the last 20 years, whenever issues turn to race, all the mainstream political candidates run the other way. Mainstream political culture is simply incapable of dealing with questions of race in this country. I think it'll be ignored.

“Look back at Clinton's attempt to have a national dialogue on race,” Stovall said. “America has reached the point where it's simply unable to deal with the issue of race. That's the dominant ethos these days.”

From document to reality
George E. Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service and a newspaper columnist, called Brown a wake-up call that still resonates powerfully.

“Brown v. Board of Education, more than any other court decision, made our conduct as a nation come closer to matching our professed ideals and values,” Curry said. “We moved from merely stating that all men are created equal to insisting that all people be treated equally and not be relegated to separate and materially inferior facilities.

‘Brown did more to open up other areas for desegregation -- public accommodations, open housing, interstate commerce and the like -- than desegregating public education.’ — GEORGE E. CURRY National Newspaper Publishers Association

“In many ways, Brown v. Board made the Constitution come alive. What had been articulated in a document became a reality, and the entire country is the better for it,” said Curry, whose weekly newspaper column is syndicated to more than 200 African-American papers.

Curry noted the decision's ripple effect on other facets of American life. “Brown did more to open up other areas for desegregation — public accommodations, open housing, interstate commerce and the like — than desegregating public education.”

What Brown v. Board ushered into America is bigger than education, and has importance for more than African Americans. Its legacy is part the process of keeping Brown a living, organic aspect of the national life, rather than a document of the distant past.

“The problem of eliminating race burden should not be just [African Americans'] responsibility,” David Dent said.

“It's a national issue,” he said. “If this experiment in a multiracial democracy is going to work, everyone needs to think about how their perceptions of race are not only unfair to African Americans ... but also unfair to the nation.”

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