The Continued Pursuit of Brown v. Board of Education: We Need to Further Desegregate New Jersey’s Public Schools, but How?
Author: Miranda Stafford
The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education
dramatically altered the American public education system and, subsequently,
the overall status of race relations in the United States. Brown, analyzing
instances of educational segregation across the country, found that the
segregation of students in the public school system on the basis of race
violated the Constitution. More specifically, the Court determined that
segregation in education improperly denied students their right to equal
protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregation, they
said, had “no place” in public education, as schooling presented “perhaps the
most important function of state and local governments.”
Despite the clear unconstitutionality of segregation, many states,
namely those which operated under the racial caste system of Jim Crow, failed
to comply with the Brown decision in a timely matter. In the interest of
enforcing desegregation, the Court handed down a judicial mandate a year
later in Brown II, outlining the general mechanisms to be used to bring states
into compliance and requiring that the desegregation of American public
schools be conducted with “all deliberate speed”. In the aftermath of Brown
and Brown II, a slew of other cases tackling specific instances of segregation in
educational settings helped to further shape the legal apparatus of
desegregation. Brown, Brown II, and their legal progeny onerously8 made
some practical progress towards their goal and led to better outcomes for
students. Ideologically, Brown became encoded in the broader understanding
of what America, and ultimately individual states, should strive for in a
democratic society.