NEWSBYLINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

Linda Darling-Hammond is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change.

Today, we mark the 56^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that many believe ended educational inequality in America. The Brown case combined several lawsuits complaining that schools for African-American children offered substandard facilities with out-of-date textbooks, insufficient supplies and inadequate curricula. Although Brown was intended to right these inequities, lawsuits have been brought in more than 40 states in recent years to protest the inadequate educational conditions experienced by low-income students of color. These issues are so ubiquitous that, as civil rights leader John Jackson notes, almost every state now has its state flag, its state bird and its school finance lawsuit.  W.E.B. DuBois's warning that the great issue of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line has spilled over into the 21st.

In South Carolina, where one of the first cases consolidated into Brown was brought, African-American parents and children returned to court exactly 50 years later, in the same courthouse in Clarendon County, to continue to litigate the lack of educational opportunity. The complaint brought by black parents in 1949 noted that "facilities, physical condition and sanitation ... the only three schools which Negro pupils are permitted to attend, are inadequate and unhealthy, the buildings and schools are old, over-crowded, and in a dilapidated condition ... [with] an insufficient number of teachers and insufficient classroom space."

Fifty years later, the testimony was eerily similar: Plaintiffs described crumbling and overcrowded facilities, lack of equipment, uncertified teachers, and teacher turnover caused by low salaries. Graduation rates ranged between 33 and 56% across the districts, and 75% of the still-segregated Clarendon County schools were rated "unsatisfactory" or below on the state rating system. A film made about these schools, entitled Corridor of Shame, showed unheated, inadequately equipped classrooms, ceiling collapses, raw sewage backing up into school hallways on rainy days and a cafeteria in which poisonous snakes had recently crawled inside from a nearby swamp.