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he U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) took more than a year to open an investigation into allegedly intentional racial segregation in Atlanta Public Schools and purported retaliation against parents who complained. The feds may soon face a similar complaint: keeping predominantly black and white elementary schools apart in a summer program intended to mitigate learning loss due to COVID-19 policies. The nonprofit Committee for APS Progress asked district officials why majority-black Hope-Hill Elementary School in Atlanta would not be housed on the same site as "the rest of the cluster schools" in Midtown — majority-white Mary...

On this date, Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced the Southern Manifesto in a speech on the House Floor. Formally titled the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had once composed the Confederacy. It marked a moment of southern defiance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision, which determined that separate school facilities for black and white school children were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an...

Media darling and Democrat Senator Kamala Harris tweeted on Monday about the power of the Supreme Court. Kamala Harris: Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California. That’s the power a Supreme Court Justice holds. There’s just one problem — Everything about that tweet is a lie.

A collective of colleges in Los Angeles suburb has been in an uproar for the past week over Facebook posts from students with one request for housing: No white roommates. A Facebook post from Karé Ureña, a junior at Pitzer College at the Claremont Colleges, asked for fellow students to join an off-campus house for the upcoming school year. “POC only,” she wrote, using the abbreviation for “people of color.” Ureña, who is black, added, “I don’t want to live with any white folks.” The post, first reported by the Claremont Independent student magazine, sparked outrage from the campus and...

Faced with alarmingly low graduation rates for black males, the University of Connecticut is trying something it calls bold -- and critics call segregation. The school's main campus in Storrs has launched a program slated for fall in which 40 black male undergraduates live together in on-campus housing. Proponents believe the students can draw on their common experiences and help each other make it to commencement. But others cringe at the idea of black-only housing, saying it turns decades of hard-fought racial progress on its head. [...] ScHOLA2RS House -- which stands for "Scholastic House of Leaders who are African...

President Barack Obama on Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision by recommitting to “the long struggle to stamp out bigotry and racism in all their forms.” Obama also met Friday in the White House East Room with families of the plaintiffs, lead attorneys Jack Greenberg and William Coleman and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Greenberg argued the case; Coleman was a leading legal strategist. …

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...