CITY, SCHOOLS: POOR, UNEQUAL AND SEPARATE

It certainly wasn't the most important matter decided during this Supreme Court term, but someday it may be. The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education was before the court again. This time the Topeka School Board was ~asking the justices to consider whether federal court control over the Topeka schools should be terminated with complete responsibility reverting to the school board.

The Supreme Court declined Topeka's request for the moment, but the time is arriving when federal judges will remove their grip on many of our nation's school districts. Before the decade is out, the Topeka schools will be deemed to have been desegregated or as desegregated as the demographic realities will allow.

Brown was the emblem of optimism for the civil rights movement. With the odious "separate but equal" doctrine laid to rest, minority children would have a right to obtain a first-rate education in integrated classrooms. Equality of education would lead to equality of opportunity, understanding and good will amongst the races. Children of all colors, of all backgrounds, would grow up as friends. But the hopes of Brown did not translate into reality.

As the Supreme Court was making its historic pronouncement in 1954, President Eisenhower was unveiling his massive interstate highway proposal that would accelerate the movement of millions of whites from the inner cities to the suburbs. Along with the white population, jobs by the millions also migrated beyond the city limits. The City of St. Louis was a metropolis of 857,000 people in 1950; by 1990 it was an urban skeleton of 396,000. The Supreme Court could articulate the precepts of constitutional decency as it did in Brown and later cases, but the court couldn't prevent white America from moving where it pleased.

The urban school districts of America have a racial composition as seen in the adjoining chart:

Integrated education is impossible in these "balkanized" urban areas. The most perplexing urban school system is in the District of Columbia. Within that district sits the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Commission and national offices of all the major civil rights organizations. Yet the public schools of our nation's capital are the most segregated in the nation. No corrective remedy has been sought. Nothing can be done the white students have vanished.

For most of urban America, the hopes of Brown v. Board of Education are unachieved. The school systems of our major cities are separate, unequal and broke. That's the direction they were heading as Brown came along. That's the way they will be when federal court supervision disappears.