The unfinished agenda of Brown v. Board of Education: a new book compiled by Black Issues in Higher Education, BIBR's sister publication, examines the impact of the landmark civil rights court decision 50 years later. BIBR excerpts it below.

Fifty years after the landmark May 17, 1954, Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, there is a critical need to foster national dialogue about its unfinished agenda. What is the historical importance of this decision as we look back from the turn of the 21st century? Was the racial injustice that the opinion decried reduced as a result of the ruling? Have any of the criticisms of the decision withstood the test of time? And most importantly, where do we go from here?

The editors of Black Issues in Higher Education--sister publication of Black Issues Book Review--put together the book The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v. Board of Education to serve as a starting point for the 50th anniversary Brown conversation. It is also a primer for anyone who lacks the confidence of information to participate fully in this dialogue. The legacy of Brown is too vital to be left exclusively to notable legal scholars like the ones who have contributed to the volume that BIBR excerpts here. The needed dialogue should reflect both a diversity of participants and an appreciation of the international significance of Brown. That is why the editors of this book have also included contributions from a daughter of a Brown plaintiff, a journalist, a linguist, an archivist, educators and psychologists, as well as voices from the Asian American and Mexican American communities. This is also why they invited me, a political commentator, to write the Introduction.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, now president and CEO of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research, is a daughter of the late Rev. Oliver L. Brown, one of the parents who filed the suit that led to the landmark decision and whose name became linked to the case:

Brown v. Board is only named for my father. He was not the architect. He was a proud member of a group that took risks by taking a stand. We are no less proud of the legacy of having this case associated with our family name, but it is our personal responsibility that people understand that he was one of a few hundred who also stood up across this country.

Everyone had to start talking about race after the Brown decision. It opened up a dialogue and forced the country to take on greater responsibility.

There were many unanticipated legacies of Brown. The most obvious is white flight. Who could have anticipated that whites would start leaving communities because their schools were going to be integrated? Who would have anticipated that we would find ourselves with so few African American educators as role models when other doors opened? Who would have thought that an academic achievement gap would be something that we would be talking about five decades later?

Zelma Henderson, the only living original plaintiff from the NAACP's 13-member roster in the Brown case. The retired beauty salon owner, now in her eighties, still lives in Topeka:

After fifty years, I still think more good came out of the case than had. I know the decision helped to open up many a field for us. I know Topeka has been very lax in supporting Brown, and it hasn't been very effective in enforcing the decision. But at elementary schools the children play together. I see them going hand in hand, little black ones, little white ones. Seeing them play together makes me feel very good, and I know that this is the way it is supposed to be.

Merrill Ross, the only black principal in Topeka, Kansas, in 1954:

On the one hand, because of Brown we have a black superintendent, we have black people at the Board of Education who attend to curriculum issues, and we have quite a few of us who are principals. On the other hand, after integration many black people moved away from the community, schools, homes and churches that served as the foundation. They prepared our children for the future. It is still an effort to acquire qualified teachers who are free of prejudices. It is part of the American dilemma.

Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP's Board of Directors:

As much as we loved and valued black schools in the South, the black teachers, the history and remembrances, equal education was never going to happen there. To get that to happen, we were going to have to sit next to white kids, because white kids were getting the best resources. The white schools were better only because the facilities were better, the books were newer, the buses that took the kids to school were better, and the play grounds were better. It wasn't whiteness that made them better, except in the sense that whiteness meant access to superior resources. The only way we were going to get equality is to get in that building with white children.

Kahlil G. Chism, educational specialist for museum programs the National Archives and Records Administration:

The Brown decision can be viewed as the inevitable fulfillment of an American promise of freedom, justice, and equality for all of its citizens. Brown was a hard-won milestone in the ongoing African American history of grassroots struggle to make America live up to its ideals, a launching pad for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and a textbook example of judicial activism.

Henry Marsh, a Virginia state senator and the first African American mayor of Richmond:

Instead of requiring immediate fulfillment, the Supreme Court built in a delay, which they called the order of deliberate speed. Constitutional rights are personal and immediate, so heretofore, if you had a constitutional right, the Court had to immediately vindicate it. But in the case of Brown, the Court built in a delay that essentially meant they could take their time. This enabled the southern states to come up with alternatives to public education. It gave them time to make adjustments before desegregation occurred so that they could establish alternative private schools. This almost overturned the impact of the decision.

Juan Williams, veteran journalist, National Public Radio correspondent and author of a biography of Thurgood Marshall:

Chief Justice Earl Warren's appointment upon the death of Chief Justice Vinson was Warren's reward for his work in California helping to secure Eisenhower's nomination for the presidency in 1952. Based on Warren's actions prior to and during World War II, Eisenhower was confident that he was appointing a rather conservative chief justice. No one could have predicted that the lawyer who argued in 1944 for the United States in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld President Roosevelt's order of internment for Japanese Americans, would launch the campaign in support of overturning Plessy.

Mary Hatwood Futrell, former president of the National Education Association, is now dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University:

Fifty years ago, African American teachers taught almost exclusively African American students. Today, many African American students, as well as students in general, may matriculate through elementary and secondary schools--even college--and never be taught by an African American teacher, much less see one in their schools. Today, there are more students from racial and ethnic minority groups, including African Americans, in our schools, and more are graduating. Many still need help to acquire the educational foundation needed to succeed in our global society. Who teaches them to meet the challenges of the future is as important as what they are taught: A highly qualified and diversified teaching profession is key to educational equity, parity, and excellence for all of America's children. It is part of the fulfillment of Brown. That would be the greatest way to pay tribute to and honor the legacy of the thousands of black educators who gave everything so that each child in America could reap the benefits of equal access to high-quality educational opportunity.

Richard L. Wright, professor of linguistics, Howard University:

What was unequal was the division of resources allocated for black education at local, state and national levels. What was excellence was the legacy of schools under the control of the black community. This is not a call for a return to an era that needed to end an illegal institution, but a call to recognize the general decline in black control and focus on the educational agenda. As a disempowered people confronting an unfriendly world, the transition for blacks from segregation to desegregation got what the plaintiffs wanted but cost them what they had!

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Brown University:

An invidious comparison that showcases a "successful" minority, Asian Americans, has been set up for the sole purpose of denigrating the character of and denying societal responsibility for the consequences of institutional racism on "failed" minorities. It is important to deconstruct this dangerous setup and recall some history that has been largely erased. It is generally not known, not even in American educational circles, that in early twentieth-century California (where most Chinese and Japanese immigrants had settled), Asian American children were forced into segregated schools.

Even more insidious, however, elite institutions such as Stanford, Brown and UCLA had quietly imposed a top-down quota on Asian American admissions, similar to the quotas imposed on Jewish immigrant students at the front end of the twentieth century. In other words, when Asian American students were able to compete as individuals against white students on the basis of the traditional meritocracy such as grades and test scores, and without the benefit of affirmative action considerations, they were subject to a higher set of standards and criteria in order to hold their numbers down in competition with white students.

Marco Portales, professor of English, Texas A&M University:

Beneficiaries of the status quo and the great majority of educators historically have demonstrated a marked reluctance to consider race as one of several factors that influence and shape their pedagogical approaches. Instead, the focus remains on teaching effectiveness and accountability concerns, yet neither of these issues centrally addresses the staggeringly high Latino and African American dropout rates. There is little agreement about the actual number of dropouts, though estimates in Texas range from as high as forty-seven percent to the single-digit numbers that are usually reported by schools that reportedly have changed their data to cover up higher dropout rates.... Mexican American and African American youngsters for this and other associated reasons are not yet achieving better results, and Brown v. Board of Education is now more than two generations old.

A. Wade Boykin, codirector of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, Howard University, and James M. Jones, professor of psychology, University of Delaware:

Even as some Americans hold up the ideal of a color-blind society, research reveals that pejorative racial stereotyping and subconscious negative racial bias persist among white Americans. We have to he conscious of race to control its most pernicious effects. Race consciousness is awareness and understanding of the consequences, challenges, opportunities, restrictions, assets and liabilities associated with racial group membership.

The implications of Brown should not be to remove race from our consideration, but to understand how it works and ameliorate its most pernicious effects while acknowledging its centrality in the drama of a multicultural and multiracial society.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., prominent legal theorist and professor at Harvard Law School:

Brown is a justifiably celebrated decision. It ended de jure public school segregation in this country--a blight that had lasted almost four hundred years and negatively affected millions of Americans, white as well as black. As a result, there is no doubt that for many African Americans, circumstances are better now than they were before the Brown decision. Many more African Americans, however, have been left behind. The irony could not be more pronounced.

Gary Orfield, codirector of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University:

What we need today is a new Brown v. Board, one that recognizes metropolitan inequality in schooling, housing and job opportunities as a fundamental affront to any idea of social justice. We need to begin a new national debate ... and address issues of a much more profoundly diverse society in which eighty percent of the population lives in complex, interdependent, but deeply stratified metropolitan areas. We need social movements and political change to revive and restore the accomplishments of Brown. This may seem impossible but surely is no more impossible than the vision of Charles Hamilton Houston at Howard Law School that we could have a nonracist constitution. If separate but equal turns out in the early twenty-first century to be as fraudulent as it was in the first half of the twentieth century, a new movement will be needed to produce the kind of successful multiracial schools that can provide the base for a successful multiracial society.

Tavis Smiley is host of PBS's Tavis Smiley, NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show, ABC Radio Network's The Smiley Report and the author of six books.

Dara N. Byrne, Ph.D., consulting editor to the Brown book project; is an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.