Yesterday, May 17, 2004, we observed the 50^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that separate public schools are “inherently unequal.”

Yesterday, I also happened to be in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the town in which I grew up and attended public schools. In an interesting footnote to history, the Fayetteville School Board became to first in the United States to officially desegregate following the Brown decision, voting so unanimously on May 21, 1954. I was in the 5^th grade at the time.

A September 11, 1954, article in the Arkansas Democrat, titled “Segregation Bows Out in Fayetteville,” chronicled the students’ enrollment in the fall term that followed: “The fact that they were breaking one of Dixie’s oldest and most prized traditions was accepted by both Negro and white students with an air of indifference.”

Although the desegregation went by without incident in Fayetteville, it was a different story in other cities, both in Arkansas and throughout the South. Some cities took issue with Fayetteville’s integrated sports teams and refused to play or hurled racial slurs at Fayetteville’s black athletes. In some cities, it was difficult to find a restaurant where black and white athletes could eat together after a game. It was three years later that Little Rock’s Central High Scholl desegregated, but only violently, under protection of the U.S. Army.

Although the issue of intentional and legal racial segregation is long past in public schools, the challenge of equity in public education still confronts us. Public schools remain unequal, with vast disparities based not technically on race, but on the wealth and demographics of the communities they serve.