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Although specifically directed toward the nation's K-12 schools, Brown v. Board also opened wider the doors of postsecondary education for African Americans. The landmark decision has led to increased enrollment of African American students in predominantly White colleges and universities. Still, 50 years after the Supreme Court's ruling, African Americans are still proportionately underrepresented in these institutions, which are frequently unwelcoming and sometimes even hostile settings.
Many Americans, especially those of African descent, thought that a new era was dawning when on May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision declaring that racial segregation in the nation's public schools was unconstitutional. The court's pronouncement, along with its subsequent declaration that the decision be implemented "with all deliberate speed," offered the impression that school desegregation would be swift and certain. The reality has been quite the opposite. Although some progress toward integration has occurred since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, particularly in the South, across the nation, K-12 schools are still significantly segregated by race. "More than 70% of the nation's Black students now attend predominantly minority schools," according to a recent report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard (Orfield, 2001). In the last decade of the 20th century, the percentage of White students attending public schools with Black students actually decreased since 1988, and the figure was lower in 2000 than in 1970. At the start of the 21st century, the top 27 largest school systems were overwhelmingly non-White and segregated (Williams, 2003).
While the text of the Brown decision was about segregation at the elementary and secondary school level, the subtext was about justice and equality throughout the educational arena and the entire social system. So, as the Court decision began to be applied at the postsecondary level, the doors of colleges and universities that had been closed to African Americans were also flung open. As we examine the result of the Court's ruling 50 years later, aggregate enrollment patterns in the nation's colleges and universities appear to show quite a different outcome than in the K-12 schools. At the time of the Brown decision, segregation was as pervasive in the nation's colleges and universities as it was in the K-12 systems, and nearly all African...