Sometimes history serves as a magnifying mirror-making momentous what actually was not. But Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, is the real tiling: a Supreme Court decision that fundamentally and forever changed America. It jump-started the modern civil-rights movement and excised a cancer eating a hole in the heart of the Constitution. So why is the celebration of its 50th anniversary so bittersweet? Why, as we raise our glasses, are there tears in our eyes? The answer is simple: Brown, for all its glory, is something of a bust. Clearly Brown altered forever the political and social landscape of an in- sufficiently conscience-stricken nation. ''Brown led to the sit-ins, the freedom marches... the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ... If you look at Brawn as ... the icebreaker that broke up... that frozen sea, then you will see it was an unequivocal success," declared Jack Greenberg, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Inc. and one of the lawyers who litigated Brown. Still, measured purely by its effects on the poor schoolchildren of color at its center, Brawn is a disappointment -in many respects a failure. So this commemoration is muted by the realization that Brown was not nearly enough.
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