“On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its landmark unanimous decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that separate schooling of black and white children was inherently unequal, marking the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. Over the next twenty years, the civil rights revolution put in place laws that attempted to guarantee, essentially for the first time since our nation’s founding, that no one should be restricted in their access to education, jobs, voting, travel, public accommodations, or housing because of race. For most people, this was what integration meant. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans might not share social space, but our public institutions, our workplaces, and our schools were no longer to be divided into separate domains, with access to the best opportunities determined by skin color. The promise of civil rights laws was that only the most private institutions—and the hearts and minds of would-be discriminators—would remain unregulated.
Fifty years after Brown v. Board, we now profess to believe that the United States should be an integrated society and that people of all races are inherently equal and entitled to the full privileges of citizenship. Here is the reality: While we accept these values in the abstract, we are mostly pretending that they are true. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the ideals of integration and equality of opportunity still elude us, and we are not being honest or forthcoming about it.” Continued @ The Center for American Progress