The 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and, of course, the hotly contested U.S. presidential election were just two of the events that dominated the headlines in 2004. Throughout the year, colleges and universities, as well as other educational institutions across the country, commemorated the Supreme Court's landmark case by…

Interviews with African American and White American elders capture the immediate power of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and the biography of its impact over time. This article reviews the lived experience of the decision and theorizes 3 threats to sustainability that ruthlessly undermined the decision over time: (a) the…

The road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a slow and circuitous climb, whereas the retreat down from Brown has been swift and direct. This article reviews 4 distinct U.S. Supreme Court eras of racial decisions: the segregation, preparatory, desegregation, and resegregation eras. It notes both the strengths and weaknesses of Brown and…

This chapter presents the author's response to Bernard Gifford and Guadalupe Valdes's article "The Linguistic Isolation of Hispanic Students in California's Public Schools: The Challenge of Reintegration." In their article, Gifford and Valdes consult the historical record concerning English-speaking Anglo contact with Spanish-speaking…

In his critique of academic writing about and public consumption of government policy and law, Jonathan Jansen uses his argument of the symbolic functions of education law and education policy as a basis for explaining the lack of progress in achieving equity and justice under "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) in the United States and…

To discover possible correlates of decisions in desegregation cases, the social background of the judges, variables from their environments, community linkages, and school district variables are examined in Southern school-desegregation cases. Order from Manning J. Dauer, Managing Editor, Journal of Politics, Department of Political Science,…

This case study illustrates that the Supreme Court's effort to construe school cases narrowly should fail, and that policy-makers, whether they are concerned with housing, schools, or other domains, should cultivate a broad perspective on the unity of the nation's racial problems. Available from The American Academy of Political and Social…

Analysis of 602 administrators, faculty, and students from Louisiana's public universities revealed attitudes about the Louisiana Consent Decree (LCD) to preserve Black institutions, including the following: (1) Blacks are more positive than Whites about the LCD; (2) LCD has caused more cooperation among Black and White schools; and (3) many are…

In the early 1990s, nearly forty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, three Supreme Court decisions dramatically altered the legal environment for court-ordered desegregation. Lower courts have released numerous school districts from their desegregation plans as a result. Over the same period racial segregation increased in public…

The Supreme Court's decision in "Missouri" underscores the majority's reluctance to find a constitutional or factual connection between segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods that would allow courts to fashion broad remedial decrees. Examines the judiciary's treatment of residential segregation and racial segregation in…

Compares textual notes taken by seventh-grade students on the 1954 school desegregation case, "Brown v. Board of Education," to those taken by legal professionals. Shows that the students rejected what they saw as violations of conventions of Supreme Court argument, while the winning argument in the actual case plays with conventions by…

The Supreme Court's opinion in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Originally named after Oliver Brown, the first of many plaintiffs listed in the lower court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the landmark decision actually resolved five separate…

May 17, 1954, the day that the "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" decision was handed down, was a watershed event not only in educational history but in U.S. history as well. It also helped to seal the Black-White paradigm into the popular consciousness, a paradigm that even today remains fixed in the minds of Americans. In most…

Based on a conference held in November 1982, this document attempts to distill and include those thoughts, arguments, and data judged to be most helpful in formulating a plan for improving and expanding voluntary interdistrict school integration in New York State. The first 3 sections describe trends over 30 years in the amount of segregation,…

One premise of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was that racial injustice could be eliminated through court ordered desegregation. Twenty-three years after Brown I, segregation continues to be one of the most complex issues confronting the country. The failure to distinguish between means (busing school children) and ends…