The Supreme Struggle:
"…the day the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the N.A.A.C.P. held a news conference to unveil an ambitious new agenda. With segregated schools now unconstitutional, the intention was to move on directly to housing segregation and employment discrimination. Thurgood Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.'s lead lawyer, admitted there was still work to be done implementing Brown, but he was sure it wouldn't take long. School segregation would be eliminated nationwide, he told reporters, within five years"
It hasn't worked out that way. This year marks Brown's 50th anniversary, but the commemorations that have already begun are bittersweet. Brown remains the most important legal decision of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. It rebuked centuries of government-sanctioned black inferiority, and it began to give real force to the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, passed to lift up the freed slaves. Most concretely, Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the court's infamous 1896 ruling endorsing separate but equal accommodations for the races.

''I don't know that there will be another moment like Brown,'' says Theodore Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. ''For African-Americans, it divides American history into a B.C. and an A.D.''

But millions of black students are celebrating Brown's anniversary in schools almost as segregated as when it was decided. It is now true, as the court held, that ''separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal.'' But 70 percent of black students attend schools in which racial minorities are a majority, and fully a third are in schools 90 to 100 percent minority. The fierce resistance that school desegregation has met in the political realm, and more recently in the courts, has many civil rights advocates and scholars lamenting what one legal academic calls Brown's ''hollow hope.'' But others are going back to the Brown decision, this year more than ever, looking for new ways to press for school integration. ''If you really believe in Brown, you can't celebrate it right now,'' says Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation. ''But the potential is there.…''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/edlife/EDCOHENT.html?ei=5070&en=0bbd2cf2591fc730&ex=1084852800&pagewanted=all&position=