WITH EVERY PASSING DECADE SINCE 1954 WE CONTINUE TO ASK OURselves how much the South and the nation have changed since the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended but equal education in public schools. The hallowed words of Thomas Jefferson that men are created equal, proclaimed at the nation's founding 178 years before Brown, seemed finally to include black men, women, and children, at least insofar as public schooling was concerned. Yet decades after court rulings ending segregation--in schools, restaurants, hotels, housing, swimming pools, and buses--the color line has hardly faded. In fact, it is beginning to look as if the line were drawn in permanent ink: black people and white people--Americans all, but still very differently situated educationally, economically, and socially. Even with massive immigration from Asia and Latin America in the last half of the twentieth century and the recent displacing of African Americans by Latinos as the nation's largest minority, we cannot seem to break free from our vision of America as fundamentally a nation of whites and blacks, with Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans playing supporting roles. In many ways we remain, as Andrew Hacker argued more than a decade ago, two nations, black and white, separate and unequal. (1) The future that the Brown decision augured and that Martin Luther King Jr. devoutly desired could only be described as a dream, given the deep divisions that separated black America from white America since the end of slavery. Yet no other court decision in our history has done more to bring an end to state-sanctioned white supremacy, to close the long era of Jim Crow, and to offer blacks the hope of achieving equality in all walks of life. That Brown and subsequent court rulings dismantling Jim Crow have not, fifty years later, significantly narrowed the gap between whites and blacks on many fronts continues to trouble most Americans. Part of the problem has to do with the negative role blackness has played throughout our nation's history. No other group in America traces its roots to the institution of slavery, when blacks were bought and sold as the property of their white masters. After the emancipation of slaves, the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did little to change white southerners' attitudes toward their former property, and as soon as federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ex-Confederates wasted little time before using local and state laws to deny blacks the very rights the newly enacted amendments were supposed to guarantee. The Supreme Court not only acquiesced in this reassertion of white supremacy (the way of life for the euphemistically inclined) but administered the coup de grace in 1896 when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separating blacks and whites on public transportation (and by implication in all public places) does not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. (2) The nation's highest court had shamelessly asserted that segregating blacks from whites had nothing to do with the pervasive belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, the fundamental principle of southern culture since the antebellum era. With the exception of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, no other Supreme Court ruling had done so much damage to the cause of equality for blacks; Plessy stood for fifty-eight years as the law of the land and was cited in hundreds of state and federal court cases as the constitutional basis for segregation in virtually all areas of life. The very premise of the way of life rested on the assumption that blacks and whites could peacefully co-exist, but only if the color line were scrupulously observed where it counted the most--in the bedroom. Even before 1896, former slaveholders and state legislators (often one and the same) enacted laws to forbid black-white marriage, not only to ensure that mulattoes would have no inheritance rights that a white man was bound to respect but more urgently to prevent black men from marrying white women. …