May/June 2004

CONTENTS

FEATURES
50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
— Laying the Groundwork
* Charles Hamilton Houston, who trained a generation of civil rights lawyers, envisioned, as early as 1934, a campaign against segregated schools.
By Genna Rae McNeil

— Separate But Unequal
A half-century ago, a well-orchestrated legal strategy, brave students and their families won the fight for equality in the U.S. Supreme Court.
By Michael Fletcher

— The Strategist
Robert Carter, who represented the Brown family, did much of the heavy lifting as the school segregation cases progressed to the Supreme Court
By Jimmie Briggs

— A Soldier’s Story
Warren County, Va., was the first in the state to close its schools when Betty Fisher and 20 other Black students tried to integrate the high school in 1958.
Interview by Lottie L. Joiner

— The Unfulfilled Promise of Brown
The nation’s schools are almost as segregated today as they were 50 years ago.
By Leland Ware

— Reconsidering Brown
Was education equity, rather than integrated idealism, the appropriate goal?
By Derrick Bell

ISSUES & VIEWS
— Election 2004: Spotlight on the Congressional Races
When Americans choose a president in the fall, they will also cast crucial votes for members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
By Terence Samuel

DEPARTMENTS
- Editor's Note

- Letters

- Up Front: The National Urban League’s annual state of Black America report; New initiative seeks to get more minorities to run for elective office; Conservationist leads effort to preserve Black historic sites; First Black student to enroll at Mississippi State University donates his papers to his alma mater; New digital archive documents slave history in California; Economic need, rather than racial diversity, emerges as focus of college programs and financial aid
Questions: New United Negro College Fund President Michael L. Lomax on the state of private Black colleges and universities

- Crisis Forum
* Dance: Avant-garde choreographer Bill T. Jones is still dancing proudly outside the lines
* Television: Is TV One, the new cable channel targeting Black adults, worth turning on?
* Books:
— Reviews of The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America by Jacob Levenson;
— Jennifer Gonnerman’s Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett; and
— The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television by Brett Pulley

- Backstory: Thurgood Marshall Jr. recalls the private side of his father, the great legal mind who was the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court

- The NAACP Today
* Renewing the call for education equity;
* The NAACP’s persistent fight for justice in America’s courtrooms;
* San Jose branch embraces its diverse community

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50TH ANNIVERSARY OF
BROWN V. BOARD
OF EDUCATION
The Verdict On
Equal Education