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September/October 2007 · Historically Speaking 31 Dudziak, who labels it an event "of such magnitude for worldwide perceptions of race and American democracy that it would become a reference point for the future." Newspapers around the world reported events, critics of the United States pointed to it as evidence of the country's disregard for human rights, and federal officials wrung their hands over the damage done. Yet in later years the U.S. Information Agency attempted to reclaim Little Rock as a triumph of presidential action in support of civil rights. The 50th anniversary of the crisis undoubtedly renews debate about how that event should be remembered . In February 2007 the courts finally declared the Litde Rock school district "unitary," thereby bringing to an end five decades of litigation. From being a 25% black minority school district in 1957, it had become a 25% white minority school district in 2007. In effect, the courts ruled on the basis that there were no white students left to integrate . A similar picture of "white flight" has emerged in other places, a sad fact that recent books by Kevin Kruse and Jonathan Kozol vividly illustrate . Current rulings of a much more conservative Supreme Court have severely curtailed lawful integration . There are those who claim that the spirit of Brown has now been undermined altogether. At the 50th anniversary of the Litde Rock crisis, that episode continues to cast a long shadow over the ambiguous outcomes of attempts by the United States to deliver equality and justice for all of its schoolchildren. John Kirk isprofessor of history at RoyalHolloway, University of London. His most recent book is Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis (University ofArkansas Press, 2007). Little Rock Betrayed Sara Bullard We should be celebrating the legacy of Little Rock. We should be looking back in wonder at how far we've come to realize the dream of nine black teenagers who in 1957 braved angry mobs to integrate a white school. Another anniversary, perhaps. This 50th we will best spend contemplating how to protect the Little Rock dream from the threat of a Supreme Court that would strip our schools of the tools they need to realize that dream. In a decision last June that struck down relatively mild policies to maintain integrated schools in Seattle and Louisville, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on die basis of race." It wasn't that simple fifty years ago, and it's not that simple today. In Litde Rock in 1957 it took extraordinary measures—the order of a Republican president, the presence of federal troops, the courage of those teenagers—to make real the right to equal education after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were inherendy unequal. Now that school systems around the country have found more civilized ways to achieve integration, the high court says it's okay not to try. (Well, exacdy half of the court. In his separate opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said it was a "profound mistake" to conclude as the majority did that schools must "accept the status quo of racial isolation." He said diat, but he voted with the majority nonetheless, and his vote decided the case.) The Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 offers what, for many, is an offensive analogy: that the kind of discrimination Brown sought to mend is U.S. Supreme Court, ca. 1950. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-H8-CTB02 -043]. equivalent to the efforts that are being made to balance the racial makeup of schools today. Judge Clarence Thomas made this dangerously simplistic argument in his concurring opinion. "What was wrong in 1954 can't be right today," he wrote. What was wrong when Brown was decided in 1954 was that thousands of black students nationwide were forced by law to attend segregated schools. What the court called wrong in 2007 were policies meant to keep schools integrated by considering race in pupil...

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