As a Black Southerner and the son and grandson of Jim Crow survivors, my life exists in the shadow of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court decision that turns 70 years old on May 17. From growing up in a racially integrated neighborhood to attending schools that the law wouldn’t have let my parents attend, there’s nothing about my life that was not affected by Brown. It’s not lost on me that I write these words from my office on the campus of the University of Kansas. It’s not far from where Linda Carol Brown, because she was Black, was made to walk past the all-white Sumner Elementary School to catch the bus to Monroe Elementary School, which was all Black.
Linda Carol Brown, because she was Black, was made to walk past the all-white Sumner Elementary School to catch the bus to Monroe Elementary School, which was all Black.
But one of the hard facts that we must confront is that in the 70 years since Brown, the social and legal resistance to desegregation has never stopped. Segregationists employed a variety of tactics whose legacies have made American education an enterprise that’s endemically segregated by race and class today. Whether it’s the all-white private schools that were created in response to Brown, the white flight out of cities that was inspired by the same ruling, a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that there’s no right to an equally funded education, or the growing popularity of publicly funded vouchers for private schools, the promise of the 1954 decision hasn’t translated into reality for today’s Linda Carol Browns.
According to a 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, “During the 2020-21 school year, more than a third of students (about 18.5 million) attended schools where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity” and “14 percent of students attended schools where 90 percent or more of the students were of a single race/ethnicity.” I will return to these legacies shortly, but it is important to unpack how Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court, which overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, justified its Brown ruling.
It used the 14th Amendment to find that segregated schools were unconstitutional even if such schools were of equal quality. (Of course, that would have been a rare occurrence, due in part to the Supre