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Although Brown is rightly celebrated as an epic civil rights milestone, its lasting influence on educational equality is less clear. This chapter explores African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American struggles for more equitable and integrated schools after 1954. It also considers how and why people of color sometimes pursued alternatives to integration, such as community control, in hopes of attaining both educational equality as well as other goals like self-determination and community empowerment. We emphasize the tremendous educational victories in the post-Brown era while acknowledging that school desegregation did not achieve the intent of equalizing educational opportunities for all students of color. Chapter 2 emphasizes three key findings: first, that white citizens, often unapologetically, opposed school integration and equalization measures from 1954 to the present; second, that improvements in public education were a direct result of sustained educational activism by communities of color; and third, that over time educational activists developed multiple nuanced conceptions of school integration as one possible tactic, among many, to equalize public education. This long history of educational activism and the multiple visions of school integration that came out of it, provides crucial lessons for how to revive public education today.

Chapter 1, “Segregation,” investigates the histories of African American, Native American, Mexican American, Chinese American, and Japanese American students from the earliest public schools through the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. It demonstrates that white officials intentionally discriminated against students of color first by excluding them from early public schools, then by segregating them as access to public education expanded, and finally by attempting to limit the curriculum for students of color to “manual training” and industrial work. It also highlights how minority educational activists fought back through both direct legal and political attacks on segregated schools as well as more subtle forms of accommodation and resistance. A key finding is that while it was clear to all that segregated facilities engendered unequal opportunities, many activists nevertheless questioned integration as a solution, and some saw enormous value in schools led by Black, Mexican American, or indigenous educators. World War II and the rising postwar civil rights movements centered new attention on segregated schools as a tool of white supremacy that must be abolished.