The question of desegregation: where do we go from here?

It's been 50 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that different schools for black and white students were separate and unequal. The decision was a springboard for the growing civil rights movement in the United States, which helped to put an end to legalized segregation 14 years later across the country. The Brown case began in 1950, after Linda Brown, a seven-year-old black schoolgirl in Topeka, Kansas, was forced to attend Monroe Elementary, a black school that was an hour walk from her house, instead of the much closer Sumner Elementary, which happened to be white. Looking for a case to test the validity of segregation, the NAACP got the Brown family to register at Sumner. When she was denied admission into the school, she became the lead plaintiff in the suit, which would eventually dismantle segregation in America's public schools.

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In its ruling, which took place four years later, the court stated that, "segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities."

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"The Brown decision was significant, because it was a symbolic attack on racism," said Dr. Robert Smith, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, and author of Black Political Encyclopedia. "It said that racism was unconstitutional."

And as a result, after 10 years of resistance to desegregation, various public school systems in the south and in other parts of the country began to implement the court order. While "legal" segregation in public schools is something that has been relegated to the history books, 50 years after Brown, segregation still persists in American education.

A July 2001 study on the state of education by the Harvard Civil Rights Project found that 70 percent of the nation's black students attend predominantly minority schools (with minority enrollment of over 50 percent), up significantly from the low point of 62.9 percent in 1980. And a third of the nation's black students (36.5 percent) attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90-100 percent.