The Emancipation Proclamation remains a positive moment in American history despite its mainly symbolic character. Brown v. Board of Education has achieved and will probably retain similar status. The three decades of campaigning to desegregate school systems, though, came to a less-than-exultant end. Black parents recognized long before their civil rights lawyers that the effort to racially balance the schools was not working. Desegregation plans were designed to provide a semblance of compliance with court orders while minimizing the burden on whites. Judges, many more conservative than their predecessors, found ways to declare the schools desegregated even in districts where the percentage of black children rose in the wake of white flight. Finally, the statistics on resegregation of once-nominally desegregated schools painfully underscores the fact that many black and Hispanic children are enrolled in schools as separate and probably more unequal than those their parents and grandparents attended under the era of “separate but equal.” Because the value of integrated schooling proved elusive, black parents and educators began looking for a more viable vehicle for their educational goals. The search was opposed by those civil rights leaders who maintained that Brown could only be read to require an end to intentional discrimination against black children through their assignment to integrated schools. With an advocate’s hindsight, Robert Carter suggested that while Brown was fashioned on the theory that equal education and integrated education were one and the same thing, the goal was not integration but equal educational opportunity. If equal educational opportunity can be achieved without integration, Carter reasoned, Brown has been satisfied. In this, he parted company with those claiming that the inescapable conclusion of the Court’s decision in Brown is that racial separation is itself an injury, regardless of parity in the facilities. By the time of his article, Carter had been out of the civil rights movement for a dozen years, but he now supported those who focused on quality of education and challenged proponents of racial-balance remedies in the courts. When groups not committed to racial balance obtained a court order for educationally oriented forms of relief, they were often opposed by civil rights organizations committed to integration, who intervened with more expertise and resources. This sometimes resulted in open confrontations between the NAACP and local blacks who favored plans oriented toward improving educational quality.
