Concrete suggestions from Gary Orfield, Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson.

In 1953, while the Supreme Court was considering the school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who opposed overturning the court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine, died of a heart attack. Quipped Justice Felix Frankfurter, this was the first evidence he had seen to prove the existence of God.

Brown v. Board of Education is probably the one Supreme Court decision that virtually every schoolchild knows. But as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the case’s legacy is far more complex than that summed up in the title of the book Simple Justice, Richard Kluger’s classic National Book Award–winning 1975 account of the decision and its aftermath.

In recent years, many scholars have subjected the Brown decision to close critical scrutiny. Among the criticisms:

Rather than seeing the decision simply through a triumphalist or racial progress lens, more recent scholarship has argued that Brown convinced many Northern liberals that racism was essentially a Southern phenomenon, that extremist resistance to desegregation was confined largely to white Southerners or to working-class bigots, and that legal changes were sufficient to address the nation’s racial divisions.

Without a doubt, the Brown decision did represent a historical watershed. It accelerated the civil rights struggle and provided impetus for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But by focusing exclusively on the de jure—the statutory—segregation of schools, the decision assumed that integration would entail nothing more than giving Black students in the South the opportunity to attend predominantly white schools, racism would somehow be overcome and equal opportunity achieved.

The high court ultimately proved reluctant to involve itself in the details of desegregation: about how to achieve greater racial balance in schools, how to ensure that Black parents and students would have an appropriate voice in designing curricula, and how to achieve greater Black representation among the teachers and school administrators.

Writing 50 years after the court decision, the Bancroft Prize–winning historian James T. Patterson of Brown University argued persuasively that in their efforts to speak with a united voice, the Supreme Court justices needlessly prolonged the desegregation process. Worse yet, their delay allowed neighborhoods and communities to resegregate without any judicial interference.

In 1979, J. Harvie Wilkinson, wow a judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote perhaps the most stinging analysis of the Supreme Court’s actions in the wake of the Brown decision. In From Brown to Bakke, he criticized the justices for dithering. By transferring responsibility for implementing the decision to 48 federal district courts and the Fourth and Fifth Circuit Courts, the results were predictable: inconsistency, delay and a lack of direction.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court failed to truly stand up for the principle it articulated in Brown—that all Americans have a right to equal education opportunity and that anything less than integrated classrooms is a violation of that right—and left the issue of inequality across school district boundaries to the states, where it remains.

Now, Leslie T. Fenwick, the author of Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership, has added yet another criticism of the decision: that Brown permitted school districts across the South to close Black schools across the South and dismiss Black principals and teachers en masse.

Two new books, one by Gary Orfield, professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at the UCLA, where he codirects the institution’s Civil Rights Project; and another by Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College, and Michael McPherson, president emeritus of the Spencer Foundation and Macalester College, offer powerful arguments about how society can “mitigate the worst consequences of America’s deeply seated inequalities.”

According to Orfield, higher education has become an instrument “for the perpetuation and even the deepening of stratification and inequality” that too often rations opportunity by price. If society is to effectively address racial inequalities, it must, he believes, take race into account, whether in tackling the financial barriers to academic success for many families of color and addressing glaring inequalities in educational preparation by race. Color-conscious policies like affirmative action admissions and financial aid “are by far the most direct and efficient ways of increasing access and success for students of color.”

Here’s what he recommends:

Colleges need to affirmatively address the needs of students of color. Proven strategies include:

Like Orfield, Baum and McPherson demonstrate that colleges, despite their commitment to equal opportunity, social mobility and racial justice, in fact produce and reproduce inequality. The authors do a masterful job of examining how differences in family structure, neighborhoods and elementary and secondary education negatively impact young people’s academic preparation and influence career aspirations, attitudes and behavior patterns.

Baum and McPherson argue that overcoming entrenched racial and class inequalities will require American society to prioritize investments precollege—in high quality preschool programs and child tax credits, for example—eliminate structural inequalities in labor markets (for example, through “better worker protections, a higher minimum wage, stronger unions, more on-the-job training for entry-level workers,” and invest more “in the postsecondary institutions that educate most low-income and marginalized students.”

Baum and McPherson are also certainly right that higher education isn’t a silver bullet that can single-handedly overcome societal inequities. But I’m glad that they highlight programs, like CUNY’s ASAP, that “can significantly increase student success at nonselective institutions that serve students who do not arrive with stellar academic credentials.”

So what are the policy implications of their analysis?

In today’s dispiriting environment, the prospects for effectively addressing racial and class inequalities strike many of us as particularly unlikely. Although some of the prescriptions in The Walls Around Opportunity and Can College Level the Playing Field? may appear somewhat fanciful and unrealistic, the authors have a remarkable track record of identifying and promoting policies that are eventually enacted.

After reading these books, you’ll never again be able to say that no one has advanced a concrete scheme to address this society’s deep-seated educational inequities. The problem before us is not a shortage of ideas. It’s a problem of will, persuasion, determination and implementation.

If we fail to follow their recommendations, shame on us.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

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