ABSTRACT
It has come to be widely known as the landmark case of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka marked for many an extraordinary victory in the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow Era White supremacy. But it has not enjoyed undisputed favor over the nearly 60 years since it was argued and won. In fact, the case (along with Brown II) and its outcome have been lighting rods for much contested ideology, policy, and practice in U.S. schooling and law (Bell, 1995; Chapman, 2006; Guinier, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Minow, 2010; Nieto, 2004; Saddler, 2005; Yosso, Parker, Solórzano, & Lynn, 2004). Contested, critiqued, or lauded, Brown has nonetheless set the terms for our national discussion around race and schooling. Segregation and desegregation (and by mistaken proxy, sometimes, integration) have become the foundational conceptual architecture for that discussion, producing a discursive space in which segregation is an axial feature. Scholarship fervently links racialized disparities in achievement and outcome to the segregation, or the current resegregation, of schools, which is by definition characterized by the acutely uneven distribution of resources (Orfield, 2001, 2009; Orfield & Lee, 2005).
