Republican strategists and politicians seized the opportunity, proclaiming themselves the new populists and denouncing busing and other forms of liberal social engineering as hurtful to "the working man." In response, "angry white males" began to abandon their old party loyalties and shift toward the GOP.

But the great tragedy of Brown, many commentators agree, is that its original emphasis on racial integration as a means toward equal education somehow shifted toward an emphasis on integration as the end itself. Lost in the shuffle of subsequent rulings and interpretations was the other desired result: educational equality. Things could have been otherwise, argues Yale legal scholar Balkin. After all, in Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that education was "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." And in Bolling v. Sharpe, which desegregated Washington, D.C., schools concurrently with the Brown decision, he almost stipulated that education itself was a fundamental constitutional right. "It would have changed the way people talked about Brown, " Balkin says. "If you can say what is really at stake is equality of education, you can talk about whether you are creating equal opportunity."

Without such clarity, subsequent decisions reached by courts more conservative than Warren's produced much narrower interpretations of Brown. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez (1973), the majority concluded that the state had no obligation to equalize funding for an urban school district whose tax base was considerably lower than that of nearby suburban districts. The 14th Amendment "does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages," the majority argued, adding that education was "not a fundamental interest" under the Constitution.

Similarly, Milliken v. Bradley (1974) overturned a federal district court ruling that found integration in greater metropolitan Detroit could be achieved by busing children from the city school district to suburban ones. Noting that the suburban districts had not themselves practiced discrimination, the Supreme Court determined that the remedy was inappropriate. Foes of affirmative action, sometimes resorting to similar logic, have also used Brown's implicit embrace of colorblindness to argue against racial preferences in admission policies.

After 50 years of Brown, might the original goals of integration and equal educational opportunity be pursued in new ways? John Brittain, a professor of law at Texas Southern University, thinks so. In 1996, he won a major Connecticut case using the state Constitution's explicit guarantee of the right to education to argue that the school districts in and around Hartford were responsible for segregation. But remedies have been slow in coming since the decision, and Brittain has turned his focus from integrating schools to integrating neighborhoods. He says he has not forsaken the goals of Brown, however: "We may have to lower our sights on the prize and take more incremental approaches, in the hope that in the long run the results will be more permanent."

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