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LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision. With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities. Desegregation does not speak to dropout...

Obituaries reporting the recent death of educational psychologist Kenneth B. Clark have quite properly highlighted the influential role that his research played in the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Clark studied how black children described black and white dolls and concluded from their more favorable reaction to white dolls that black children regarded themselves as inferior. The Court in Brown cited his findings — and other "modern authority" on "psychological knowledge" — in determining that segregated public schools "generate[] a feeling of inferiority as to [black children's] status in the community." For that...

May 17 saw several gatherings commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. But the event held in Washington, D.C.'s Constitution Hall will be the one to be remembered because of Bill Cosby's remarks, which won him scathing criticism from some in the black community. For years, I've argued that most of the problems many black Americans face today have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination. For the most part, the most devastating problems encountered by a large segment of the black community are self-inflicted. Bill Cosby...

Class Struggle School equality: a black responsibility? Cathy Young A few days after the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, an extraordinary panel met in New York City to discuss the urgent problem still posed by the racial gap in educational achievement. The panel was part of an event many would be quick to identify as a "conservative" venue—a conference of the National Organization of Scholars, an 11-year-old group formed in opposition to "political correctness" in academia. The same conference offered a workshop on new legal strategies to combat race-based preferences in college admissions. Many, perhaps most, of...

While honoring the efforts and sacrifices of the people whose struggles culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended school segregation in this country, New York University Professor Derrick Bell provocatively suggested last week that generations of black children might have been better off if the case had failed.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark decision in which the Supreme Court struck down race-based student assignments in public schools. Ironically, next month will then mark the one-year anniversary of Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Court upheld the use of race-based student admissions in universities. It is not surprising that, when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor blessed the use of racial preferences to achieve "diversity" at the University of Michigan law school this past June, she must have felt guilty about playing fast and loose with the Constitution's ban...

• An article on Monday about the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation misstated a word in a paraphrase from President Bush, who attended a ceremony in Topeka, Kan. He called for a continuing battle to end racial inequality — not equality. (Go to Article) • An article on Saturday about remarks by President Bush at a commencement address at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis., referred imprecisely to protests against his policies. While no protesters were at the actual ceremony, the Secret Service did allow them several blocks away. (Go to Article)

Cosby, Saying the Darndest Things • Bill Cosby was anything but politically correct in his remarks Monday night at a Constitution Hall bash commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To astonishment, laughter and applause, Cosby mocked everything from urban fashion to black spending and speaking habits. Bill Cosby, ready to let off steam. (Lawrence Jackson - AP) "Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he declared. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend...

THE BROWN v. Board of Education decision, celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, was by no means the end of the civil rights struggle. In one sense, it was even a false dawn. The legal meliorism that underpinned the decision — i.e., the idea that things will get steadily better over time, one court ruling at a time — didn’t break segregation in America. That was accomplished by a movement that explicitly rejected the go-slow, work-within-the-system logic of Brown. We think of the civil rights movement as a triumph of a forward-looking and optimistic liberalism. But that’s only part of...

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) -- President Bush marked a half-century of school integration at the symbolic home of the movement Monday, saying "it changed America for the better, and forever." "Fifty years ago today, nine judges announced that they had looked at the Constitution and saw no justification for the segregation and humiliation of an entire race," Bush said at the opening of a national historic site at Monroe Elementary, a former all-black school in the heartland of the school desegregation effort. "Here on the corner of 15th and Monroe, and in schools like it across America, that was a day...

On Brown Anniversary, Kerry Says We Must Continue to Come Together to Expand Opportunity 5/17/2004 11:29:00 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk Contact: Sarah Gegenheimer of John Kerry for President, 202-712-3000 TOPEKA, Kansas, May 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in Topeka Monday, John Kerry said we have come far since 1954 but still have work to do in America before we realize the full promise of the landmark civil rights decision. While we take time to reflect on our progress, Kerry said it is important that we continue to...

In the newspaper look of the day, the front page of The Spokesman-Review on May 17, 1954, contained 15 to 20 stories -- most under one-column headlines -- and a couple of black and white photographs. Near the center of the page, a wire item filed by the Associated Press from Louisville, Ky., related an outrage that reminds us today of the temper of those times. An electrical contractor named Andrew E. Wade IV wanted to buy a house that his wife had fallen in love with. There was a problem, though. The Wades were black and the house was...

President Bush spoke Monday to mark the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision that ended racially segregated schools. He greeted the fueling squadron on the way in, and greeted the Air National Guard troops on the way out of the airport at Topeka, Kansas.

Black Activist Group Speaks Out on Legacy of Brown Desegregation Decision 5/17/2004 6:00:00 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk Contact: David Almasi of Project21, 202-371-1400 ext. 106 or Project21@nationalcenter.org WASHINGTON, May 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In observance of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, members and staff of the Project 21 African-American leadership network are available for comment. On Monday, May 17, Project 21 director David Almasi will be addressing the Brown legacy on the CNNfn program "Market Call" at approximately 9:50 am eastern. In addition, Almasi is the...

<p>Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered racial integration of public schools in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, middle-class flight has resegregated most big-city public-school systems.</p> <p>"Why are we not all joyfully dancing, celebrating our collective release from the bondage of prejudice and inequality?" asks Ellis Cose in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation about the results a half-century after the court ruled that state-enforced racial separation in public facilities was unconstitutional.</p>

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Linda Brown had no idea she was making history in the fall of 1950 when her father, the Rev. Oliver Brown, took her by the hand and marched her to an all-white school near her home. Several other black parents in Topeka also tried to enroll their children in all-white schools that fall. Their requests were denied, laying the groundwork for a legal case that would overturn segregated education nationwide 50 years ago Monday. In the years since, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education has been a blessing and a burden for the Brown family: A...

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's decision 50 years ago, although an immense blessing to the nation, also carries a melancholy lesson. It is that great events -- the school desegregation ruling was the largest judicial event since the Dred Scott case of 1857 -- have myriad reverberations, some beneficial, others not. Brown v. Board of Education accelerated the process of bringing this creedal nation into closer conformity to its creed. But the decision also encouraged the abandonment of constitutional reasoning -- of constitutional law. It invested the judiciary with a prestige that begot arrogance. And it seemed to legitimize a...

Rise of a judicial dictatorship Pat Buchanan (archive) May 16, 2004 | Print | Send When the Warren Court handed down its most famous decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, this writer had a ringside seat at a high school in the inner city of Washington, D.C. While the Catholic schools had been integrated since 1948 by Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle, D.C. public schools remained segregated. But when the new school year began that fall, desegregation was dramatic, swift and peaceful. Hopes for success were high. The first sign of social change one saw, hitchhiking to...

The Supreme Court's decision 50 years ago, although an immense blessing to the nation, also carries a melancholy lesson. It is that great events -- the school desegregation ruling was the largest judicial event since the Dred Scott case of 1857 -- have myriad reverberations, some beneficial, others not. Brown v. Board of Education accelerated the process of bringing this creedal nation into closer conformity to its creed. But the decision also encouraged the abandonment of constitutional reasoning -- of constitutional law. It invested the judiciary with a prestige that begot arrogance. And it seemed to legitimize a legislative mentality...

Monday May 17, 2004 it will be exactly 50 years to the day and date of the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education case. You'll hear a lot of talk about a 50 year celebration of the decision and much flap-a-doodle about the 'victory' black folks won on Monday May 17, 2004 when seperate but equal education was ruled unconsitutional and integrated schools became the law of the land.

They were six words that convulsed a nation. On May 17, 1954 - 50 years ago - nine justices of the US Supreme Court declared: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Before them was the case of Linda Brown, a seven-year-old black student in Topeka, Kansas, who was suing the local board of education so she could attend a whites-only school closer to her home, rather than a far away, segregated black school. The judges' decision in Brown v Board undid a notorious 1896 decision, Plessey v Ferguson, which had legalised the idea that black and white Americans could receive...

Although Brown v. Board of Education dealt with race and with schools, its judicial philosophy spread rapidly to issues having nothing to do with race or schools. In the half century since Brown, judges at all levels have become unelected legislators imposing the vision of the political left across a wide spectrum. For example, the anti-business vision of the left was apparent in another Supreme Court case with Brown in its title -- Brown Shoe Co. v. United States. In this 1962 case, the same Chief Justice Earl Warren who delivered the landmark racial decision now ruled that a merger...

The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education was immediately about schools, even though it quickly became a precedent for outlawing racial segregation in other government-controlled institutions and programs. What was the basis for that landmark decision and what have been the actual effects of Brown v. Board of Education on the education of black students? The key sentence in the Brown decision was: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." It was not just that the previous "separate but equal" doctrine was not being followed in practice. Rather, the Supreme Court argued that there was no way to make...

In all the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, there has been remarkably little critical examination of the reasoning used by that decision. Indeed, much of what has been said about that decision over the past half-century has treated the result as paramount and the reasoning as incidental. But today, with 50 years of experience behind us, it is painfully clear that the educational results of Brown have been meager for black children. Meanwhile, the kind of reasoning used in Brown has had serious negative repercussions on our whole...

May 17, 1954 -- half a century ago -- saw one of the most momentous decisions in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Some observers who were there said that one of the black-robed Justices sat on the great bench with tears in his eyes. The case was of course Brown v. Board of Education, and the decision declared that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. In rapid succession, all kinds of other racial segregation, which were common across most of the South and even in some border states, were likewise declared unconstitutional. This was a reversal...

After the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordering the desegregation of public schools in Topeka, Kansas, lawsuits promptly were brought to dismantle legally sanctioned segregation in other states. One of these was Arkansas. There, Governor Orville Faubus and other state officials maintained that they were not bound by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown. That decision was constitutionally incorrect, they insisted, and amounted to a federal court’s usurpation of the constitutional authority of the states. Moreover, Arkansas was not a party in the case. Therefore, they contended that a lower federal court in Little...