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 Supreme Court’s 1899 ruling in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education that allowed Black people’s tax dollars to be used to fund schools only white people could attend.) For Black students, Warren wrote in the unanimous decision, segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. … The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.”
Some assert that Black students don’t need to be in the same room as white students to learn. Of course, this is true, but it’s also irrelevant to the importance of Brown ending legal segregation. The deranged logic of Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the Jim Crow racial caste system, and rejecting that deranged logic was the point of the ruling. To invoke Justice John Marshall Harlan’s extraordinary dissent in Plessy, “But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here.” To be segregated by law, to paraphrase constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, is to be labeled as inferior by the state.
All arguments against this obvious truth are variations of the nonsense in the Plessy decision that segregation is only “a badge of inferiority” because “the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
As for the legacies of resistance to integration, a preferred tactic of segregationists was to found so-called segregation academies, private schools that were whites-only, until the Supreme Court ruled that private schools could not discriminate on the basis of race in Runyon v. McCray in 1976, 22 years after the Brown decision. Many secular and religious private schools still operating today were founded as segregation academies.
Voucher programs like the ones in Georgia, Louisiana and Washington, D.C., may serve diverse student populations now, but public vouchers to attend private schools began as a scheme to keep white children and children of color in segregated schools because private schools could racially discriminate until 1976.
The two biggest blows to Brown came in 1973 and 1974 with the Supreme Court rulings in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley, respectively. In the first case, parents in the majority Mexican American Edgewood school district said funding schools using the local tax base denied their children the right to an equal education, but the Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional right to an equally funded education. In the next year’s Milliken case, the court upheld an absurd distinction between segregation by law and segregation by custom (de jure versus de facto segregation) as if segregation by custom were not created by law. Justice William O. Douglas pointed out that absurdity in his dissenting opinion. “There is, so far as the school cases go, no constitutional difference between de facto and de jure segregation,” he wrote. “Restrictive covenants maintained by state action or inaction build black ghettos. It is state action when public funds are dispensed by housing agencies to build racial ghettos.” I say that I live in the shadow of Brown, but the truth is that all of us, regardless of race, live in that shadow. When we recognize that America is still having the same debate over desegregation that began on May 17, 1954, then today’s culture war fights — over the consideration of race as part of holistic admissions at highly selective schools, the inclusion of non-white history and literature into the standard curriculum, and the rise of charter schools — become more understandable. Some argue that the Brown decision is irrelevant today or that it failed. I disagree. For all the scheming of men and women dedicated to rolling back the tide of integration, they have only been successful in slowing it. Jim Crow’s insane racial caste system was overthrown in an attempt to create a multiracial democracy in a world where none had previously existed. This grand project is a work in progress, and the setbacks have rocked the country to its foundations because the clash between integration and segregation has existed as long as the country has. Most critically, the Brown decision reminds us that equality and segregation are fundamentally incompatible concepts in law and society and that if diversity is America’s strength, then an integrated America is an America at its strongest.
Nicholas Mitchell
Nicholas Mitchell is an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the University of Kansas. He is a curriculum theorist whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of education theory, policy and practice. He is the author of "On Bigotry" by Bloomsbury Publishing. 
