Prometheus 6

What Brown Means Today
How Brown v. Board of Education helped change America — and how it didn't
By KRISTINA DELL

…Just two lawyers from the team that argued Brown are still alive, and they answer that question in very different ways. Yet both are still involved in civil rights work and both become contentious when asked about current racial disparities. "The schools we have today with black kids were the kind of schools we had before Brown," says Carter, 87, from his roomy chambers in downtown Manhattan where he has been a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of New York since 1972. Professor Jack Greenberg, 79, is more sanguine. "Do you want to take a glass half-empty or a glass-half full approach?" he asks. "In 1954, that glass was 100 percent empty."

Still, the numbers aren't pretty. Harvard's Civil Rights Project shows that the proportion of black children in the South's white-majority schools has dropped significantly over the past fourteen years, fom an average of 43.5% to 32.7%. But the most segregated schools are found in the North with New York, California, Michigan and Illinois having the lowest percentages of black students in majority-white schools. Ironically, many blacks have moved back to the South because the conditions there are better than in places like Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore.

Beyond segregation, blacks continue to lag behind educationally. More than 70% of white students graduate from high school on time; just over half of black and Hispanic students do. Blacks make up 8.5% of all students in U.S. graduate programs, well short of their percentage of the young adult population. That can lead to economic disparity: the black unemployment rate is almost double the rate of whites. In 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the poverty rate for whites was 7.8% whereas for African Americans it reached 24.1%.

A lot of these numbers result from socio-economic trends: many schools are funded by local property taxes which have caused gross disparities among districts, often built on income and race. Even though the law desegregated schools, many blacks never made it out of the poor inner cities to the better-funded schools usually found in the suburbs. Carter sees affirmative action as one way to bridge the gap. Once blacks were free to go ahead and attend white schools, "they were supposed to be on the same starting line. But, they need some kind of help to get them into the mainstream."

But, Carter argues, the biggest reason Brown hasn't been a complete success lies in the Supreme Court. When the 1954 Brown decision came down, the Court did not specify a remedy for school segregation. A year later it issued Brown v. Board of Education II, which said that the transition to integration should happen "with all deliberate speed." That, says Carter, paved the way for years of foot-dragging, and institutionalized resistance. "When the Supreme Court made that decision 'over time' I lost all respect for it, because they departed from all precedence," said Carter. "I have never known a case where the Supreme Court held that you're entitled to a right that is not vindicated immediately. 'Over time' allowed the South to prepare and work and believe they could defy the Court." …