"One More River to Cross" Recognizing the Real Injury in Brown: A Prerequisite to Shaping New Remedies -Charles Lawrence

• Segregation
• Supreme Court
• Misunderstanding
• Recognize
• Black Children
• Elimination
• Devise and Demand
• Pupil Placement
• Civil Rights Case
• Brown vs. Board

Charles Lawrence argues that the Brown decision fostered a way of thinking about segregation that has allowed both the judiciary and society at large to deny the reality of race in America, that the recognition of that reality is critical to the framing of any meaningful remedy-judicial or political-and that Brown may ultimately be labeled a success only insofar as we are able to make it stand for what it should have stood for in 1954.

1. "The first is that segregation's only purpose is to label or define blacks as inferior and thus exclude them from full and equal participation in society."
2. "The second is that blacks are injured by the existence of the system or institution of segregation rather than by particular segregating acts."
3. The third is that the institution of segregation is organic and self-perpetuating. Once established it will not be eliminated by mere removal of public sanction but must be affirmatively destroyed.