Brown v. Board was meant to ensure that children of different racial groups would share classrooms. But resistance to allowing Black teachers and principals to oversee white students' education led an estimated 100,000 Black educators to leave their profession.
Ongoing residential segregation by race and income, along with school reforms allowing parents to exercise choice in school attendance, have contributed to ongoing patterns of segregated public education that threaten the nation's ability to create a pluralistic democracy.
The legal distinction between "de facto" and "de jure" segregation has always been a convenient fiction allowing the perpetuation of segregation by obscuring the role of government in creating and sustaining a racially discriminatory housing market.
"A steadfast Republican committed to union-management cooperation, peace through treaties, competitive capitalism, and empowerment of African-Americans, George Shultz was the last old-fashioned Progressive."
Ruby Bridges, whose integration of New Orleans Schools in 1960 was captured by Norman Rockwell, has written a children's history book about her experiences.
The Supreme Court's artful directive to desegregate with "all deliberate speed" invited many school districts to do so as slowly as possible. Historian Millicent Brown was the first Black student to integrate a white high school in Charleston, South Carolina and has researched a book about the experiences of similar students.
Edith White was part of a team of women who served the US Navy as codebreakers, and fought for democratic values like integrated schools after the war's end.
