ABSTRACT
Several desegregation cases came before the Supreme Court in the years following World War II, but in 1954 the case of Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas would literally change the face of the nation. In a radical departure from past rulings, the court found that separate schools for black and white children were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The first major blow against Anglo conformity was struck. Although Brown addressed the segregation of black children from white schools, the decision reached far beyond the black/white struggles of the southern United States. In other parts of the country, children of Asian, Native American, and Mexican descent had also been segregated from their AngloAmerican peers for purposes of schooling. These children, too, were provided access to an equal education under the new ruling. Of course, schools soon invented intraschool segregation (tracking) to circumvent the intent of the ruling while maintaining the appearance of compliance; nonetheless they were forced to accept the presence of nonwhite, non-Anglo persons in their midst and, as a consequence, neither the schools nor the society would ever again be the same.
