How Brown v. Board of Education succeeded—and how it didn’t

Richard Rothstein EPI blog reprinted by the The Washington Post, April 24, 2014

The Brown decision focused the nation’s attention on black subjugation in a fashion not seen since Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the South after the Civil War. Brown’s 1954 success in highlighting the nation’s racial caste system gave encouragement to a wave of freedom rides…. But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission—to undo the school segregation that persists as a modal characteristic of American public education today.