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A couple of months ago, the nation observed the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools. Brown, described by many constitutional scholars as the most important court decision of the 20th century, has become a part of American iconography. Everybody, nowadays, is for it.

Brown shattered assumptions about race and the structure of society. In the ensuing years, it sparked a civil rights revolution that has changed everything from the way we talk about skin color to the composition of the American workforce. The courageous lawyers—and plaintiffs—who pressed the case, sometimes at serious risk to their lives, deserve all the accolades history can bestow.

Yet Brown, for its treasured place in the American story, was controversial. Opposition was hardly limited to a handful of diehard segregationists. Some mainstream newspapers opposed it. So did many leading politicians. There were even opponents within the black community. Many worried that thousands of black teachers would lose their jobs (they did) or that local parents would lose control of their schools (that happened, too). The law of unintended consequences applies to every great achievement, and Brown was no exception.

Sadly, many of the decision's opponents were evangelical Christians, even though the Southern Baptist Convention by that time had taken a stand against segregation. But, all through the South, pastors told their flocks that God had decreed separation of the races. Others said the Bible had nothing to say about social arrangements and the church should therefore stay out of the controversy. Brown also sparked the founding of the "segregation academies," many of them professedly Christian, that continue to dot the Bible Belt.

Indeed, Brown changed the public education system—but not in the way its supporters hoped. The revolution turned out to be a rather uneven one. For almost a decade, few segregated school districts changed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which denies federal funds to schools that discriminate, may have had as much to do with the ultimate shift as the court decision did. (To be sure, without the decision, there might have been no Act.)

The larger problem is that the nation's public schools have largely resegregated, with some three-quarters of black children attending predominantly black schools. Ironically, the data show that the most segregated states are nowadays the liberal "blue" states, with New York, Illinois, Michigan, and California topping the list. The aforementioned segregation academies have had some small negative effect on school integration, but "white flight"—largely a Northern and Midwestern phenomenon—has had a much larger effect.

Unfortunately, a new report by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and the Urban Institute says, "In every state, districts with high minority concentrations had lower graduation rates than districts where whites were the majority." The study found that while 75 percent of white high schoolers graduated in 2001, only 50 percent of black high school students did.

I would be the last person to argue that black kids cannot be well educated in mostly black schools, such as the elementary schools I attended in New York and Washington, D.C. I did not, to my knowledge, suffer in consequence. But the preservation of segregated education, of whatever quality, is not what the shining promise of Brown was all about.

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July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7