May 17 is the 60th anniversary of Brown vs Board of Education, the US Supreme court's 1954 decision that prohibited Southern states from segregating schools by race. The Brown decision annihilated the "separate but equal" rule, previously sanctioned by the supreme Court in 1896, that permitted sates and school districts to designated some schools "Whites-only" and others "Negroes-only". More important, by focusing the nation's attention on subjugation of blacks, it helped fuel a wave of freedom rides, sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading ultimately to civil rights legislation in the late 1950's and 1960's. But brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission to undo the school segregation that persist as a central feature
