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American children should be improved; we should focus on good schools regardless of whether they are integrated. Others, however, argue that racial integration is necessary for the achievement of full and equal citizenship for African Americans.

[Sidebar: Segregated education, not segregated movie houses or drinking fountains, was the foundation of Jim Crow. Segregated education was the line of demarcation between oppressor and oppressed; it policed the boundary of the racial hierarchy.]

The irony is that both are right. The problem is that they're talking about two different things, but Brown embodied both.

The first approach focuses on the individual dimensions of public education: what a child needs to learn in order to thrive within society. The second focuses on the social or collective dimension of public education. The problem for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP was that the public schools are the vehicle for achieving both of these things, and segregated education was cruelly efficient at generating harms both to individuals and at the collective level. For individuals, segregated education in grossly inferior one-room tar paper shack schools all but eliminated opportunities for personal advancement and damaged some people permanently.

Segregated education, not segregated movie houses or drinking from fountains, was the foundation of Jim Crow. Segregated education was the line of demarcation between oppressor and oppressed; it policed the boundary of the racial hierarchy. Which side of that line you stood on determined where you could go in the world. Even if you were fortunate enough to be educated in one of the few excellent segregated schools, you faced severely limited horizons. The classic example is W. E. B. DuBois. The first black American to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, he could not find an academic appointment at a white institution in the United States. That was the point at which the confinement of the horizon was most cruel.

Brown therefore had its most transformative power in the collective dimension, in its impact on racial oppression, and not necessarily on racial conflict. Along with the kind of direct action and protest led by Martin Luther King and others, Brown eventually destroyed the capacity of white supremacists to maintain powerful lines of social demarcation between whites and blacks. The physical enforcement of Brown by soldiers with guns brought down a legalized system of racial hierarchy. It eliminated segregation, and Jim Crow, as an ideal. Polls in the 1950s reported a high percentage of people who said that white kids and black kids should not go to school together. By the 1970s, only about four to six percent of the American population said schools should be segregated by law, and those folks were viewed as almost a lunative fringe. ¹ Segregated seducation was no longer a viable ideal. Brown did that.

What Brown didn't do was create a better educational system that conferred individual advantages on all school children. Integration in and of

18 African-American Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center