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itself does not necessarily produce a better learning environment. Studies show that under particular circumstances, integration can create better learning opportunities, but test scores show that integration alone will not do the trick. That of course does not mean that integration should not be undertaken; instead, it means that the conditions under which integration produces social conflict have to be minimized through strong executive leadership - that of the president, governors, mayors. Leadership was the key to the different experiences of Buffalo and Boston, which went through an integration struggle at the same time but had vastly different results in terms of how kids were able to learn.2

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So we must view Brown with an awareness of the difference between racial oppression and racial conflict. Brown profoundly challenged and changed the ability of white supremacists to engage in racial oppression. It was too much to expect that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP and the Supreme Court and the "fifty-eight lonely men" at the federal district court level could also provide us with an educational system resulting in high test scores for all school children.3 It is simply not the same kind of task.

The second thing I want to address is the notion of rights consciousness and a liberal commitment to an ideology of law. Nothing in Thurgood Marshall's speeches or in the accounts of him in James Patterson's book or elsewhere suggests that he was a naive man. He seemed to have a firm understanding of power: who had it, who wielded it, and who was vulnerable to it. Yet, ironically, much of his work in the NAACP was premised on the remarkable proposition that an unfair and distorted legal system that denied basic civil rights and liberties to African Americans could be used to gain advantage for those who had no political power. It is an insane idea on its face. Why try to achieve your objectives through a system that is so stacked against you? Why should a legal system that formally relegates African Americans to second or even third class status find within itself the resources to obliterate those legal distinctions? How can a legal system that is the foundation of these distinctions be the means by which to eliminate them? And all that Thurgood Marshall had for encouragement was the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment says in part, "No state shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." That was in some respects a hollow promise, particularly to the roughly 3,000 people who were lynched and tortured without any protection of law between the 1880s and the 1930s. "Separate but equal" was a kind of wallpaper that rationalized the hollow promise for jurists, but the promise simply didn't exist as a lived reality. And yet time and time again,