Content area
Full Text
This article explores the idea that at its 50th anniversary, Brown provides proof that despite its landmark significance, based on relief in the courts, its principles can create a backlash of unintended consequences. Stated differently, battles won can be revoked. To highlight the fact that the war for equitable educational opportunity persists, we examine here various litigious and legislative assaults upon historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Why of all the multitudinous groups of people in this country [do] you have to single out Negroes and give them this separate treatment? The only thing [it] can be is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible; and now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.
Thurgood Marshall, 1953
(From Friedman, 1969, pp. 239-240)
INTRODUCTION
Thurgood Marshall and his NAACP colleagues understood the role of educational opportunity in perpetuating systemic disadvantage and they chose the U.S. Supreme Court as the battleground to challenge the separate and discriminatory treatment African Americans endured. In 2004, five decades later, the 1954 Brown decision has long since taken on a life of its own superseding the legal questions it sought then to redress, yet, the fundamental conviction relative to the importance of schooling in American society has intensified (Bell, 2004a). Educational institutions represent the gatekeepers of social and economic mobility and quality of life more in the 21st century than they did on May 17, 1954 when the Supreme Court rendered its epochal Brown v. Board of Education decision. Escalating significance associated with performance at all levels of schooling is due in large measure to heavy reliance upon technological innovation, demographic shifts, and the competitive pressures of a globalized economy.
Colleges and universities were not the specific the focus of the Brown decision; however, arguments in favor of equitable access to publicly funded educational venues by inference and extension included all aspects of higher educational policy. In the post-Brown era, the courts have continued to play a significant role in defining policies and practices that, by design, provide or narrow the treatment for all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations,...