Brown v. Board of Education Never Fully Implemented - Whites Resist Going to School, Living with Blacks

In the 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in public schools, the nation has yet to fully implement the U.S. Supreme Court decision, said a leading civil rights attorney. Charles Ogletree Jr. addressed a luncheon meeting Tuesday at Duke University of the Harvard Club of the Triangle and Harvard Law School Association. About 30 people heard Ogletree discuss the Supreme Court and his recent book "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education." Ogletree is a Harvard Law School professor. He represented Anita Hill in her allegations of sexual harassment in 1991 against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and is lead counsel in a lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa, Okla., race riots. Although the Brown decision, whose 50th anniversary was observed last year, is often thought of as decisive and singular, it was one of several legal challenges to public-school segregation, Ogletree said. Perhaps more significantly, it was really two cases, with the second one providing the means of integration. But its opinion also contained the phrase of his book's title, which in legal parlance meant that schools could take their time about integration, in deference to those who would resist it indefinitely. "That's exactly what happened," Ogletree said. The resistance hasn't ended, he added "In some sense, 50 years after Brown, we're seeing the same problems," he said. They include "white flight," de facto segregation of schools by shifting attendance patterns. [more]