In 1951 three brief commentaries in the Journal of Negro Education drew public attention to the potentially tenuous job security of African-American educators in the South, Black professionals whose employment status was being called into question as southern educational institutions faced the prospect of desegregation. The specific incident which occasioned these commentaries was a December 1950 vote by the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville to close the segregated, all-Black Louisville Municipal College, which it had administered since that college was founded in 1931, and to integrate the two institutions' student bodies. Fourteen African-American faculty and staff at Louisville Municipal College were informed that, despite tenure or contract status, they would be given two months' severance pay and summarily dismissed. With United States Supreme Court legal precedents from the 1938 Gaines case through the 1950 Sweatt and McLauren decisions already dramatically affecting the policy context of southern higher education, and with what would become known as the “Brown Decision” looming on the horizon, what might be the consequences for all Black educators throughout the South—if the high court overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers urged?

In June 1944, a delegation of African-American leaders met with New York City school officials to discuss a central focus of black concern: history textbooks. That delegation reflected a broad spectrum of metropolitan Black opinion: Chaired by the radical city councilman Benjamin J. Davis, it included the publisher of the Amsterdam News—New York's major Black newspaper—as well as the bishop of the African Orthodox Church. In a joint statement, the delegates praised public schools' recent efforts to promote “intercultural education”—and to reduce “prejudice”—via drama, music, and art. Yet if history texts continued to spread lies about the past, Blacks insisted, all of these other programs would come to naught. One book described slaves as “happy”; another applauded the Ku Klux Klan for keeping “foolish Negroes” out of government. “Such passages… could well have come from the mouths of the fascist enemies of our nation,” the Black delegation warned. Even as America fought “Nazi doctrine” overseas, African Americans maintained, the country needed to purge this philosophy from history books at home.

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers:

1. • How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?

2. • How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?

3. • How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?

4. • Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

“Did Brown really desegregate schools?” This is the question that inevitably is asked when we begin our study of Brown v. Board in my graduate level class, “The History of Education in the United States.” Certainly, it is a valid question, but one that is problematic when one tries to reconcile the goals of the landmark case with the large number of segregated schools that exist today. When students compare how many segregated schools exist today with those of 1954, the simple answer, according to them, appears to be that Brown did not desegregate schools. It is the complexity of addressing this issue that makes teaching Brown a challenge. Pedagogically I should welcome the opportunity to teach such an issue that has no easy conclusion. As a result, it has the power to engage and challenge students in complex ways. Yet, there is a part of me that dreads teaching Brown because I fear that I cannot do justice to the enormity of that decision for the United States in 1954, nor to the significance that it has taken on in the ensuing decades. However, even with these challenges, how could I not teach Brown? From the outset I want to make clear that this is a reflective as opposed to directive piece. I certainly do not believe that I have a lock on the best way to teach Brown. Instead, I would like this essay to reflect my own uncertainty about what is pedagogically most effective.

When I ask students in my educational history and policy courses about the 1954 Brown decision and more broadly about the idea of integration, they recognize that desegregation might be a good strategy to equalize resources but add indignantly that black children certainly do not need to sit next to whites in order to learn. Students of color tend to be more critical of integration than whites, but all have as much difficulty imagining a good integrated school as a good segregated one; all have difficulty imagining the social vision that fueled demands for integration.

Some teaching innovations arise from a combination of good intentions, last-minute planning, and incredible luck. Colgate University hired me in late July 1997 as a visiting professor for the fall semester. As I scrambled to finish my dissertation and move my family, only a few days remained to pull together the syllabus for a course on Race and Education. I wanted to begin this contemporary course with an historical focus, delving into African-American experiences with school desegregation during the mid twentieth century, but could not decide on which of the many excellent historical case studies to assign. The bookstore wanted my order as soon as possible. So I ordered two books—David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road and Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential—hoping that at least one would arrive on time. When both magically appeared on the bookstore shelves a day before the first class, I decided to innovate and revised the syllabus. Half of the students would read Cecelski; the other half would read Walker. Despite some initial confusion, my students began to engage in serious discussions over historical interpretations of school desegregation, demonstrating a level of depth that would not have happened had I assigned only one book to the entire class.

The Brown decisions have become part of our collective American memory. Students know that the 1954 decision ended legalized segregation in elementary and secondary schools and rightly understand it as a benchmark in educational history. However, when pressed for information on the decisions, few have ever read the original court documents and even fewer realize there were two separate decisions, that four states and the District of Columbia were involved, and that the South fought aggressively for years to nullify their effect on school attendance. To teach Brown is to deconstruct simple notions of Civil Rights Movement triumphs and visions of a country eager to right historical wrongs. I incorporate Brown into three of my courses, but for the purposes of this piece I will focus on my Education for Liberation class since I believe that its comparative approach to Brown—as well as the entire class syllabus—teaches the worth of looking at educational reform through a variety of lenses.

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.