Brown Lives On

There are a couple of amazing tales related to the epic case of Brown v. Board of Education. Linda Brown, the daughter of Oliver Brown, who brought the desegregation case to the Supreme Court is still alive. That is terrific news in a number of respects. Linda has helped to create a foundation to foster educational equality.

Not only does Linda live on, sadly, so does the epidemic of desegregation. There is ample evidence of this tragic scenario, some of which I have laid out over the past couple of days.

I believe Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times has summed it up quite succinctly in a piece which appeared yesterday. Said Steinberg, "Today, the law isn't the problem. Official brutality isn't the problem. The problem is the inertia of a system built up and maintained by both, continuing on its own accord in this segregated city."

Americans have built this system, it didn't happen by accident. And just as surely as we allowed segregation to proliferate in American schools we can just as surely put an end to it. We have to have the courage to do so.

Dick