Has the U.S. given up on school desegregation?

(GEORGE CURRY MEDIA)—May 17 marked the 62nd anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing so-called separate but equal public schools. As usual, the annual anniversary of the Supreme Court decision prompts reflection and an examination of the status of school desegregation in the United States.
The decision effectively superseded the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding racial segregation. In an earlier case, Chief Justice Roger G. Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision in 1857 that he believed that Blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.”
Brown was lauded as a long overdue break with that kind of defective thinking and was expected to pave the way for the equal treatment of all of the nation’s citizens. Not only were the public schools not immediately desegregated in the wake of Brown, more than six decades later, we seem less committed to school desegregation.