![]() ![]() Fifty years have passed since Brown, and we still need more time to form a more perfect union with all deliberate speed. ![]() Sandra Day O'Connor, the Supreme Court's first woman justice, said last year that it may take 25 more years before we don't need affirmative action anymore. And yet, race continues to make problems of class even more vexing. It is fashionable these days to say that our race problems are really a problem of economic class. A lot of families can't afford to have a choice. Thanks to Brown, we can have as much integration as we can afford, regardless of race, creed or color. But the divide between rich and poor among blacks alone is larger than the divide between blacks and whites. The black middle class has tripled in size since the 1960s. School patterns follow housing patterns, which follow income patterns, as well as race. When you buy your house, you buy your school. After work, most of us go home to largely segregated lives. Today's America is more integrated overall, but mostly in the workplace. But school enrollment numbers don't tell the whole story. Fifty years after Brown, desegregation is turning back into re-segregation. Most white students across the country still have little contact with black or Hispanic students, and vice versa. All other things being equal, our analysis suggests that the optimal point for issuing a refund on early fraud warnings is on charges that are roughly less. So how much progress have we made? A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says public schools nationwide are almost as segregated as they were when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. In 1991, the Supreme Court, with little fanfare, allowed a return to neighborhood schools instead of busing, even if the result was more segregation. Courts began to decide that the goals of Brown had largely been achieved. School desegregation peaked in the late 1980s. The high court paved the way for an energized decade of civil rights protests, confrontations and, eventually, legislation.Įnforcement of Brown also brought a backlash over school busing, sometimes violently, even in liberal cities of the north like Boston. But Brown did change the law in our nation of laws from a headwind to a tailwind for black progress, backing us up instead of getting in the way. Ten years after Brown, fewer than 1 percent of segregated schools had been desegregated. "Deliberate speed" turned out to be very deliberate. The high court took the case up again in 1955 and called for enforcement "with all deliberate speed." Another bitter irony: "Deliberate" means "slow." "Slow speed" is a curious phrase, an oxymoron, like a "deafening silence" or the "more perfect union" that the Constitution strives to achieve. ![]()
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