what is the impact of brown vs board of education

There was probably no other single decision that so starkly separated the old world from the new.

With Brown - literally a two-decision bombshell that spread into 1955 - the stage was set for no less than the future of the nation. The fundamental right to knowledge, information - in an increasingly complex age - was judicially reaffirmed to be one for all Americans. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that had long institutionalized the separate-but-equal doctrine in American life. In one lightning stroke, Brown soundly repudiated Plessy v. The Supreme Court, ruling on combined cases from Topeka, Kan., to Clarendon County, S.C., handed down the Brown decision on May 17, 1954. Other black families joined in the litigation, and in 1951 the NAACP requested an injunction banning segregation of Topeka's schools.

When Linda was rebuffed, she became the lead plaintiff in the case that bears her family name. The NAACP, looking for a test case to use to fight segregation, got the Brown family to take Linda to Sumner and ask to register her as a student. In 1950, Linda Brown, a 7-year-old Topeka, Kan., schoolgirl generally unaware of racial animus, attended Monroe Elementary, a predominantly black school - forced to take an 80-minute trek that included a six-block walk through the potentially dangerous switchyards of the Rock Island railroad line, despite living closer to Sumner Elementary, attended by white students. Like all pivotal judicial statements, Brown has its origins in a human dilemma.

A survey of enrollment statistics reveals that, in several important ways, the school segregation Brown was enacted to end more than two generations ago remains a fact of life today, in some parts of the country worse now than it was at the time of the decisions.

What is the impact of brown vs board of education