As America celebrates the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark ruling that struck down segregation in America's public schools — it's important to remember that it hasn't solved everything, a black educator said Tuesday.

"We thought that the end of all obstacles had come," Dr. Ernest L. Holloway told his audience, remembering May 17, 1954. But 50 years later there are more black men in prison than in college, there are still black students who graduate from high school not knowing how to read, and there are not enough minority teachers, he said.

Holloway, president of Oklahoma's Langston University, was the keynote speaker at the NAACP Salt Lake Branch's dinner, "Brown 50 Years and Beyond: Promise and Progress."

"Our promise is that we have the law on our side," Holloway said. But, he added, "we must take greater responsibility, my African-American brothers and sisters . . . for empowering our young people to be all that they can be."

In America, he said, "good is not good enough. Only the best will really pass the test of being a success in America." That's why he tells the young black students who want to come to his university: "You can't come here with your pants hanging off you." In an evening full of applause, this line received the biggest ovation.

"You have to be 'better than,' " Holloway said he tells his students, "even in this free society."

It troubles him, he said, that his students arrive at his school and tell him "this is the first time they ever had anyone who had expectations of them."

"Our future extends beyond athletics," he added, then turned to Dr. Cecil O. Samuelson, president of Brigham Young University, who sat at the head table. "I know who you have running up and down the field. I want to know who is in the classroom."

"Brown" was the right decision, Holloway told his audience at the Little American Hotel. But it also had a darker side that "brought about tremendous harm to a lot of people." That legacy includes the laying off of black teachers as "Brown" was implemented; the federal marshals called in when nine students tried to enter Central High in Little Rock; the flight of white families as black students were bused to previously all-white schools.

Still, as Holloway also noted, 50 years after Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the superintendent of Topeka schools is an African-American. And Holloway's historically black Langston University is now the most integrated university in Oklahoma.

Before becoming a university administrator, Holloway taught science at Boley High School in Boley, Okla.— where one of his students was Jeanetta Williams, now president of the Salt Lake Branch of the NAACP.

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