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Academics

The broken promise of Brown

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created legal tools that allowed the federal government to push forward with desegregation, Dorosin said.

In the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court boldly acknowledged the inherent inequality of the separate-but-equal doctrine in the field of education.

Six decades later, our country again faces segregated schools separated by race, class and measurable inequities. Three Carolina scholars offer insight into Brown’s unfulfilled promise of educational equality.

MARK DOROSIN

To integrate with “all deliberate speed.”

The line is forever linked with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, but it didn’t come until a year later, in 1955, with a case that came to be known as “Brown II,” said Mark Dorosin, the managing attorney for the UNC Center for Civil Rights who teaches civil rights and political science at Carolina’s School of Law.

Dana Thompson Dorsey, an assistant professor in Carolina’s School of Education, is one of three scholars to share insight into Brown v. Board of Education.

As for the speed, well, that did not come at all.

“There were a few high-profile cases like Little Rock, Arkansas, but the South settled into this entrenched resistance to the idea of integrating,” Dorosin said. “Ten years after Brown, less than 2 percent of African-American students were attending white schools.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created legal tools that allowed the federal government to push forward with desegregation, Dorosin said, but the court didn’t re-engage until 1968, with Green v. County School Board of New Kent County in Virginia. In Green, the Supreme Court established six key benchmarks lower courts used to measure whether a school district was complying with desegregation orders.

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