Dream Deferred but Not Defeated

Abstract

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, may have been the seminal civil rights event of the twentieth century. It led to the dismantling of the systems of laws that kept blacks shackled as closely to slavery as possible. But the expectations of the lawyers and civil rights leaders that equality would follow such a decision were dashed because they had underestimated both the depth of American racism and the enormity of the remaining task of getting all of America's black agricultural workers into the mainstream economy. As the twentieth century ends, that task, left over from slavery, still faces the American people.