Fifty years after the Supreme Court ended racial apartheid in the United States, the tapestry of this country has changed significantly, yet more must be done. In the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court dealt its final blow to the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown and its companion cases were part of the strategy to eliminate de jure segregation. Some of the country’s best legal minds worked on these cases including, Thurgood Marshall (Director-Counsel NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.), Robert Carter, Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, III, James Nabrit, Jr., Constance Baker Motley, Jack Greenberg, Charles L. Black, Jr., and Jack B. Weinstein. Working with the NAACP and other community activists, these lawyers and others used a multi-year, multi-faceted approach that tolled the death Knell of Jim Crow. Brown is arguably the most significant of their victories. While the Brown decision had a broad impact on de jure segregation in all facets of American life, it is most recognized for the sweeping changes it required in public education.

Although Brown held great promise for the future of this country toward achieving racial equality, its potential was stymied by massive white resistance. Brown was clearly no magic panacea for the structural racism that existed, nor could it change “the hearts and minds” of Americans. In the decades since Brown, this country has resisted not only desegregation but also equality. In the first 20 years after Brown, many whites bucked desegregation by refusing admission of Black students to their schools, closing down public schools altogether or pulling their children out and putting them in private segregation academies. Fifty years later, the impediments to desegregation and inequality still exist.

Today Black and Latino students are more segregated in impoverished school districts than at any time in the last three decades, according to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Children of color continue to attend poorly resourced and dilapidated schools where they receive inferior education and are often pushed out and onto the track to prison. The work of Brown is not done.

Public education continues to serve a fundamental role in our democracy. We must continue to support it and aspire to achieve the promised of Brown – equal educational opportunities for all children.

We honor those who engineered Brown and those who risked their lives in the struggle for equal educational opportunities. Each of us must commit to working endlessly towards making the promise of Brown a reality.