Brown v Board: Progress but still an unfulfilled promise

A white teenage boy puts his fingers in his ears as students demonstrate for civil rights during the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. (Photo by Paul Slade/Getty Images)

The promise of an equal education for Black students didn’t come to my Louisiana high school until my junior year in 1966 , more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board decision outlawing school segregation.

As President Joe Biden and civil rights leaders marked the 70th anniversary of that historic ruling on Friday, May 17, we should recognize the bittersweet history and take note of the unfulfilled promise.

I grew up on a Louisiana sugar plantation and vividly remember Black children who lived in the segregated “quarters” waiting on their school bus to take them to the only school for Black students about 10 miles away while my bus trundled through on its way to a much closer elementary school for white kids. Even after a federal judge ordered our schools desegregated, no Black children would ride that bus until years after I graduated in 1968.

Massive, often violent, white resistance to desegregation delayed enforcement of the 1954 Brown ruling across much of the South. A culture indoctrinated in the belief that Black people shouldn’t “mix” with whites didn’t willingly accept what was a morally just thing to do.

New Orleans schools weren’t desegregated until 1960, by a Black 6-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges and three other girls . Three years before New Orleans’ “desegregation crisis,” Little Rock of course endured its “Lost Year,” and saw the bravery of the Little Rock Nine .

The most obnoxious result of court-ordered desegregation in Louisiana, Arkansas and much of the South was the creation of segregation academies , private schools for white kids only. Those schools persist today, even if many of them have loosened their admission rules to enroll some nonwhite students in order to get state education money.

The enduring legacy of Brown v. Board in Arkansas and across the South is one of resistance, dodgy state laws that tried to circumvent the ruling, federal court orders, reluctant acceptance, and a slide toward resegregation resulting from white flight and the adoption of universal school voucher systems in many states, most in the South.

Yes, we should definitely celebrate the importance and impact of that 1954 Supreme Court decision. We should also celebrate the brave district federal judges who for years afterward did the hard work of making sure school districts complied with the abolition of the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Yet the struggle to provide an equitable education for all children continues.

At the federal level, a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court has dismantled affirmative action .

In Arkansas, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the state’s system of funding public education was unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to create a system of equitable and adequate education funding. While that ruling had no direct racial dimension, it nonetheless meant potential improvement for poor and majority Black districts.

But eight years after that decision, the same court ruled that school districts could keep any property tax revenue in excess of that required by law, essentially assuring that rich districts would stay rich and poor districts would continue to struggle.

More recently, Attorney General Tim Griffin has argued in federal court filings that consent decrees resulting from Brown v. Board litigation in some school districts are outdated and violate state school choice laws. In March, a judge denied Griffin’s motions to intervene in those cases. He has notified the court of his intention to appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

And of course, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ vaunted LEARNS Act created a voucher system that in another year will extend to all Arkansas students. The governor and her legislative enablers argue that this system will make a more equitable education available to all, but the evidence from other states is less than convincing .

What remains 70 years after the Warren court decided that public education should be equitable and equally available to all children is a public education system that struggles to deliver on that promise. Not because it can’t deliver but because social and legal barriers continue to stand in its way.

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