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Many of the continuing conflict of the post-Brown era arise because in a larger analytical sense, we are faced with the equivalent of integrating cheerleading squads. The standard by which we should judge integration is unclear, and this is particularly true about measures of opportunities for social and educational advancement. What are the appropriate criteria for people who are admitted to higher education or graduate education? Is getting into law school like being the fastest running back, or is getting into law school like being evaluated as an applicant for the cheerleading squad? If it is like trying to get on an athletic team, then the metric is clear: it is test scores and grades. But if it is more like choosing cheerleads, then candidates for law school and graduate school have to be assessed according to a very different set of skills.

[question mark in margin by underlined text in the above paragraph]

Brown doesn`t provide us with easy answers. In a sense, it`s good to have these problems; certainly, it is better to have the problem of our how measure the success of Brown than to be back in the era of segregation. What we have to remember is that the expectation that Brown would eliminate racial conflict was hopelessly naive. Brown generates racial conflict because it needs to, because we've progressed, and in some ways that is a very hopeful thing.

[Large exclamation point in margin next to the above underlined paragraph]

NOTES

1. Christine H. Rossell, "The Convergence of Black and White Attitudes on School Desegregation Issues," in Neal Devins and Davison M. Douglas, eds., Redefining Equality (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 123.

2. See, generally, Steven J. L. Taylor Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo (SUNY Press, 1998).

[Steven J. L. Taylor's name is circled with a note in the margin: "AU Prof"]

3. The phrase is from Jack Peltason, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men (Harcourt, Brace, 1967).

4. James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 85.

5. Pamela Grundy, Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twenthieth-Century North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

BROWN V. BOARD: ITS IMPACT ON EDUCATION, AND WHAT IT LEFT UNDONE 21