Perhaps no Supreme Court decision has generated more controversy and conflict over such a protracted period of time as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). Few decisions of that Court have brought about as much fundamental social change, and certainly none have touched as many families and educational institutions across so many communities. However, from the very outset, Brown has not been easily accepted by all those whose interests it promised to affect. Appreciable disagreements continue to persist regarding the meaning of the Court's ruling in the case, the assumptions on which it was predicated, and its effectiveness in promoting school integration and equal and equitable educational opportunities. This should not be surprising. Unanimity regarding the desirability of any social policy is achievable perhaps only on the Supreme Court, and even there only for a relatively transitory period. In the world where policies are implemented, their subjective meaning inevitably varies from community to community, school to school, and even family to family.Recognizing that perspectives differ, it may still be socially useful 40 years after Brown to discuss some of the impacts this case has had on American public education and speculate on whether its legacy is likely to wither or endure into the 21st century. This epilogue seeks to accomplish those two purposes.THE FIRST 40 YEARS: SOME INCONTROVERTIBLE OUTCOMESBefore assessing the future of Brown, it is important to examine some of the fundamental, but often ignored contributions it has made in its first 40 years. One outcome of Brown is that, while it has not eradicated racial segregation from public schools in the United States, it has ended the policy of publicly enforced or sanctioned segregation. This change has caused a dramatic reduction in the proportion of African American students attending all-Black schools. It has also increased the proportion of Blacks in majority-White schools in the 17 southern and border states where de jure segregation existed at the time the case was presented to the High Court (Orfield, 1993). Figure I illustrates these points.(Figure I omitted)More than one million African American students in those 17 states entered majority-White schools for the first time between 1968 and 1972 (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1975). During this single four-year period, 498 school districts implemented court orders calling for complete desegregation, and 496 other districts had or were in the process of negotiating plans with the federal government (Nixon, 1970). An additional 200 mostly small- to middle-sized school districts across the country also voluntarily adopted plans between 1965 and 1975 to end pupil isolation and redress educational inequalities (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1976).Recent analyses of some 1,116 school districts (enrolling 56% of all African American children nationwide) revealed that 960 of them report significantly reduced levels of segregation since 1976 (Taeuber, 1990). Of these, two out of three remained virtually as desegregated a decade later. Only 3% reported total resegregation by the mid-1980s--that is, their level of segregation some 30 years after Brown approximated that found prior to desegregation. The data, of course, do not diminish the reality that in a significant number of non-southern urban systems with large proportions of African American students, the equal distribution of Black students produces an illusory sense of progress. In actuality, Black and White students have almost no possibility for daily interracial contact in these central-city districts. Clearly, it is important not to judge a policy and its efficacy solely on the basis of its effectiveness in a numerically small, if strategically important, group of communities where the problems of pupil segregation are most intractable.Another contribution of the Court's ruling in Brown is the breadth of its vision. …