Newswise — Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that brought major changes in national and social policy and focused the nation on the issue of racial discrimination in public education.
To take a look back at the 1954 decision, to spark a dialogue about the decision's importance, and to examine its legacy, a Bucknell University education professor has set up a wide-ranging program on the Brown decision that began Dec. 2 and will conclude next spring.
Abe Feuerstein, an associate professor of education at Bucknell, says it's important to re-examine Brown at this time because the decision "represented the highest aspirations of our society to create equal educational opportunity for all children. Basically, Brown sought to reconcile the ideals of liberty, freedom, justice, and equality with then common practices like segregation."
Although it took an entire decade for Brown to actually make a difference, Feuerstein says, through the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by the 1970s real progress was being made toward the desegregation of our nation's schools.
Unfortunately, Feuerstein says, that progress later began to erode because of changes in the Supreme Court, problems with busing, and growing dissent about the best way to create equal educational opportunity.
In lining up symposium participants, Feuerstein says he has looked for individuals whose work focuses on greater racial equality, but who play differing roles and have varying points of view. Two of the five participants are Bucknell alumni — James Nevels, class of '79, who heads a successful investment firm near Philadelphia and chairs Philadelphia's school reform commission, and the Rev. Wayne Carter, class of '74, an educational leader and school board member in Hartford, Conn.
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