No Longer Separate, But Not Yet Equal

Fifty years after a historic Supreme Court decision, TIME visits the communities at the heart of the integration debate

No one--not the celebrating black families, not the enraged white Southerners and Midwesterners, not the curious onlookers in the Northeast and the West--would have guessed the way race relations in America would evolve a half-century later. For 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the most integrated schools in the U.S. are in the South. The most segregated are in New York and California. The federal courts--once the preferred tool of integrationists-- have become a major force in the resegregation of schools. And the formerly...

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