Each morning, 10 yellow school buses end their circuit through Montclair, New Jersey, to drop off 149 of Renaissance Middle School's 225 students. Ali, grandson of Charles and Marjorie Baskerville, is among the group of students who arrive by bus. Ali's grandparents with other community activists, almost forty years ago, began the long and hard fight for school integration in this northern town. After court battles, parent meetings, community resistance, and ultimate victory, the struggle resulted in a public school system dedicated to both “choice” and integration. To those who retain the memory of struggle, Montclair's school buses and their routes, almost thirty years old, are a regular reminder of the magnet school plan implemented during the 1977–1978 school year.

About fifteen years ago, I heard Anne Firor Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor Emerita at Duke University, recount an exercise that she assigned to incoming Duke students: “How did your hometown respond to the Brown decision?” Students were required to consult local newspapers and public records, to interview relatives, neighbors, teachers, and public officials, and to carry out other research to address this query. Intrigued by this investigation, I devised an autobiographical version of this writing assignment for students at my northern campus. For the past several years, I have launched sections of my African American History II course with a first-person version of Scott's inquiry: “How has race, and especially the Brown decision, affected your educational history?” It began as a first-day, in-class writing assignment, but the most recent iteration asks them to draw upon course readings and library research resources to illuminate their personal experiences of race and education, from elementary grades to present-day college years. Students submit their first drafts near the beginning of the semester, reflect on historical readings and class discussions, and then revise their autobiographies by the end of the course. Student postings on our electronic discussion board make their reflections more public than traditional writing assignments, sparking discussions about how our perspectives have been shaped by different experiences of race and education.

Although it is obligatory to mark the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, why it deserves to be commemorated is not necessarily obvious at a distance of fifty years. The decision itself, Richard Kluger made clear in Simple Justice, was unprepossessing and unassertive. Delivered in pedestrian language, “the only soaring sentence,” he rightly pointed out, claimed that segregation could affect Black children's “hearts and minds in a way unlikely to be ever undone” (p. 705). The decision, in fact, emphasized the psychological damage African Americans putatively experienced rather than exposed the hypocrisy of Plessy v. Ferguson's contention that racial classifications were not designed to impose an inferior standing on Black people. Additionally, this emphasis on psychological damage was supported by social science citations which gave top billing to Kenneth Clark, whose dubious research on African-American children's doll preferences had been persuasively critiqued by opposing counsel John W. Davis, and, according to Kluger, had even been “the source of considerable derision” among some of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers (p. 321). Finally, an implementation decision was deferred until Brown II, which a year later required that desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed,” limited relief to plaintiffs in the offending districts, left the nature of that relief to the district judges who had ruled against desegregation, and unleashed vigorous white resistance across much of the South.

Five or so years ago, I sat down to write a proposal to fund the writing of a history of school desegregation. This was not easy to write, since I had to account for the legal history of the process since the Brown decision, as well as the actual amount and kind of school desegregation that had taken place in that period, and come up with a definitive, overarching theme by which these two accounts would be tied together. Though the proposal was finished and submitted for funding, I was dissatisfied with my ability to say anything thematically novel or convincing about what had transpired in the forty-five or so years since the decision had been rendered. The funding agency evidently agreed with my own view of the proposal as it was not approved. So, I put my interest in school desegregation on the back burner, where it has rested until now. Once again, I get to confront the issue of whether or not I have anything interesting to say about Brown and its aftermath.

Richard Kluger's monumental Simple Justice reaffirms the long-held liberal contention that any analysis of the complex social relations in the United States must acknowledge the centrality of racism. Racism historically contributed to shaping of the political culture, social interactions, and legal status of groups throughout the United States. This work is of epic proportions, tracing in great detail the evolution of the history of the black struggle to overturn the 1896 Plessy decision which declared the fallacious, antidemocratic notion that “separate but equal” meets the test of the Constitution.