Is America better off since Brown ruling?

WASHINGTON — Is (school desegregation) chiefly a movement to abolish a caste system? Is it at heart actually a class struggle intensified by racism? Should it be measured strictly in constitutional terms? By educational yardsticks? By how much it may unite or separate the races? By its importance as the centerpiece on which many other civil rights gains have been balanced? By some combination of these elements?

Noel Epstein, my former Washington Post colleague, wrote those words nearly 29 years ago in an article in which he tried to assess the impact of busing to achieve racial desegregation in the public schools. His point: You can't hope to reach consensus on an answer unless you can agree on what the question is.

Epstein's admonition is worth recalling today as America takes note of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation.

How much better off are we as a society as a result of that decision?

"It's too simplistic to say, as some are saying, 'that it didn't work,' " Theodore Shaw, the new director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said over a recent lunch.

"It worked to end legal school segregation, and I think you'd agree that's a good thing. It helped launch the modern civil rights movement, and at least some of the desegregation, not just in schools but in all walks of life, is directly traceable to Brown v. Board of Education."

Shaw, who was born six months after the decision came down, says the LDF is not prepared to fold its tent on the issue. Indeed, he says he plans to redouble the organization's efforts against what he sees as a rear guard assault on even voluntary desegregation.

Sheryll Cashin, nearly a decade younger than Shaw, is less sanguine about the legacy of Brown. A law professor at Georgetown, daughter of an Alabama civil rights activist and former law clerk to the late justice Thurgood Marshall, Cashin would answer in the negative to virtually every permutation of the Epstein question.

Brown ended state-sanctioned Jim Crow laws, she admits, but it didn't end what she calls "our tacit agreement to separate along lines of race and class." As a result, blacks in 21st century America remain largely separate and unequal.