Heeding black voices: The court, Brown, and challenges in building a multiracial democracy
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In 1967, thirteen years after the first Brown v. Board of Education decision, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. voiced great frustration with the lack of progress in societal desegregation: [e]very civil rights law is still substantially more dishonored than honored. School desegregation is still 90 percent unimplemented across the land. . . . Legislation that is evaded, substantially nullified and unenforced is a mockery of the law. Dr. King articulated the views of most African-Americans, views stemming from centuries of painful experiences with systemic racism in U.S. society. Thus, for more than a decade after Brown, white officials in southern districts defied the mandates and implications of Supreme Court and lower federal court rulings and, therefore, the black perspective on U.S. racism and racial change. Indeed, by 1960-1961 only a miniscule 0.16 percent of black children were in school with white children in the South.
