Mother Jones, May 17, 2019
Sixty-five years ago today, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren declared that “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” in America’s public schools. Segregated schools were unconstitutional. Gone were the “inherently unequal” all-black schools and all-white schools. Or so we thought.
Below are photos from the Brown v. Board of Education era, but don’t mistake them for artifacts of a bygone time. The “growth of racial and economic segregation that began then has now continued for nearly three decades, placing the promise of Brown at grave risk,” researchers wrote in a recent UCLA Civil Rights Project report.