The "Brown" decision represents a watershed moment in U.S. history as the remedy served as a guiding light during a pandemic. A pandemic is an epidemic taking place on a scale that spans the globe. A circumstance is not a pandemic merely because it exists in different regions of the world or results in the death of many people; it must…

Building on W. E. B. Du Bois's color line concept, I argue that white supremacy is deeply embedded in U.S. educational organizations and that White racial actors, opportunity hoarding, and the cultivation of racial ideology and racial ignorance help sustain it. In doing this, I seek to move away from the aspirational progress narratives often…

National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb"--among the most powerful moments of the 2021 presidential inauguration--inspired the central inquiry of the 18th Annual "Brown" Lecture in Education Research: Why are we still climbing the hill of educational equity 67 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's…

The historical record reveals that in the final opinion of the landmark school segregation case "Cooper v. Aaron," the U.S. Supreme Court justices intentionally used the term "desegregation" rather than "integration" to soften the ire of those opposed to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision. The…

Whereas increased scholarly attention is focusing on contemporary school closings, noticeably absent is the placement of this scholarship within the historical context of Black people's social experiences. This paradigm shift would reveal a much longer history that has had devastating consequences for Black people. In this article, we identify…

Mr. Williams, a student during segregation and educator who began his career in the years following the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, sheds light on why Black students succeeded in all-Black schools as well as challenges faced in advancing racial justice. In his context, according to Mr. Williams, Black students succeeded…

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to rehear for the second time the case of "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1953, the 83rd Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280--policies that would terminate federal treaty and trust responsibilities to Native Americans. Even as post-"Brown" desegregation went…

Building on the premise that closing achievement gaps is an economic imperative both to regain international educational supremacy and to maintain global economic competitiveness, I ask whether it is possible to rewrite the social contract so that education is a fundamental right--a statutory guarantee--that is both uniform across states and…