In the 1960s, as counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Derrick Bell helped make sure that white-controlled school districts across the country were abiding by desegregation orders. In 1971, he became the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School. He left Harvard in 1992 and is now a visiting professor of law at New York University. His most recent book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform, was published last month by Oxford University Press.

It is worthwhile to remember the skill and persistence of the mainly black lawyers who got these cases to the Supreme Court after a 20-year effort. This was an era in which black lawyers were not held in high regard by most whites and more than a few blacks. And we certainly should remember the black parents and children whose belief in the law was sufficiently strong that they risked economic reprisals and physical harm to challenge segregated schooling.

I don’t think it is healthy that the anniversary of Brown has become the “Flag Day” of the civil-rights movement however: a time to gather, renew our commitment, and join in singing “We Shall Overcome.” For reasons that may not have even been apparent to the members of the Supreme Court, their school-desegregation decision achieved a far loftier place in legal history than they were able to accomplish in reforming the ideology of racial domination that Plessy v. Ferguson [the Court’s 1896 ruling that separate-but-equal facilities for blacks were legal] represented.

The Brownexperience teaches that advocates of racial justice should rely less on judicial decisions and more on tactics, actions, even attitudes that challenge the continuing assumptions of white dominance. History -- as well as current events -- call for realism in our racial dealings. Traditional statements of freedom and justice for all, the usual fare on celebratory occasions, serve to mask continuing manifestations of inequality that beset and divide people along lines of color and class.

Fifty years after legalized segregation was deemed inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional, we have to ask ourselves: How close is America to achieving racial equality or a colorblind society?

The statistics of racial disparity indicate that we are not at all close. Indeed, the disparities of income, unemployment, educational attainment, even infant mortality and life expectancy, are growing larger. But because some blacks seem to be doing well, there is the sense that full equality is just around the corner. It isn’t, obviously for those living in poverty or the almost 50 percent of black men from ages 16 to 64 in New York City who are unemployed. Even those more successful find it difficult to free themselves from invisibility and the still frustrating fetters of racial subordination.

Judge Robert L. Carter, a NAACP lawyer who helped prepare and argue the Brown cases, admits that he did not understand the depths of white supremacy. Thurgood Marshall felt that in five years the schools would be fully desegregated. Members of the Supreme Court were deeply concerned about [southern] resistance to a decision rendering segregated schools unconstitutional, but they were urged by the government in its amici briefs to eliminate segregation because it was hurting our foreign policy abroad and posing a threat to efforts at home to counteract subversive elements.

What neither [Chief Justice Earl] Warren nor most of the rest of us recognized was that segregation was not ... simply a “taint” or “bias.” It was the dominant interpretive framework for a social structure that organizes [America’s racial hierarchy and systematic subordination of blacks]. Segregation was not merely an oppressive legal regime; it consolidated the imaginative lens through which Americans would conceive race. It also reaffirmed the binary system through which we Americans tend to think of race, i.e., “black” and “white.”

In law, the Brown decision is irrelevant. It remains an icon of encouragement of what the courts once did and what they might do again. And it is a wonderful reassurance to many white Americans, as reflected by the Yale commencement two years ago when Judge Carter received an honorary degree.

As Georgetown Law Professor Michael Seidman has pointed out, Brown brought about a transformation without real change. The Court in Brown faced a massive contradiction between the nation’s oft-cited commitment to equality and the great value whites placed on the racial preferences and priorities given tacit approval by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. By purporting to resolve those contradictions, Brown served to end the destabilizing potential [of black subordination]. Yet it also served to reinforce the fiction that, because the decision rejected the racial barriers imposed by segregation, the path of progress would be clear. [Conventional wisdom came to be that] everyone can and should make it through individual ability and effort. One would have thought that this reinforcement of the status quo would placate if not please even the strongest supporters of segregation. To the contrary, the Brown decision provided [white] politicians with a racial issue through which to enrage and upset large groups of white people, initially in the South but far more generally as efforts to implement the decision moved across the country. By keeping the focus on race, [white politicians] could ride into office without much of any other obligation.

Having handled hundreds of school-desegregation cases in the early 1960s, and dedicated so much time and energy to gaining court orders requiring unitary racial school systems, it is painful to realize at this late date that, for the following reasons, black children would have gained better educations had the Court required strict enforcement of the “equal” part of the separate-but-equal standard.

The Court’s wonderful opinion in the 1954 Brown decision encouraged blacks but enraged whites, whose leaders gained and held political support by leading a massive resistance movement.

Many southern states in the years before Brown -- and admittedly to strengthen their argument that the schools were equal -- had been authorizing substantial amounts of money to improve the resources in black schools. A Supreme Court order requiring this effort to continue -- and setting enforceable standards and guidelines -- would have enabled black teachers and administrators to function more effectively. The Brown decision halted virtually all efforts to improve black schools.

Yet black schools, while lacking the resources available to their white counterparts, managed to effectively educate scores of black children.

Had school districts been required to equalize the salaries and resources in both black and white schools, the heavy financial burden would have led many to work out voluntary plans for school desegregation. And if the Court’s equalization order had required the placement of blacks elected by the black community on school boards, there is a chance that desegregation plans -- when courts finally ordered them -- would not have been so one-sidedly in favor whites as most of them were.

As to desegregation more generally, I agree with the commentators who point to the many factors after World War II that would have led to an end to formal segregation even had the Supreme Court done no more than reaffirm the separate-but-equal standard of Plessy v. Ferguson. Protests like the Montgomery bus boycott, begun the year before Brown, reflected the increasing unwillingness of black people to accept the deep humiliation of segregated facilities. In addition, major business interests saw rigid patterns of segregation as a serious barrier to industrialization of the South. Policy-makers must have realized that blacks could be kept in subordinate positions without the hassle of maintaining signs and separate facilities.

It is important to recognize that Brown was not a revolutionary decision. Remember, black people had been challenging segregation in the public schools since 1850, without success.

The self-interested motivations for Brown in the 20th century are quite like those that prompted [Abraham] Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in the 19th century. Lincoln hated slavery, but his priority was to save the Union.

The convergence of interests is far more important to gaining relief from racial injustice than the degree of harm suffered by blacks or the character of proof offered to prove this harm. The efforts of black organizations over many years to get the Congress to enact an anti-lynching law [provides a great example of this fact]. It never happened despite the fact that thousands of black people were killed in horrible ways over several decades.

Isn’t the 1955 decision in Brown, with its “all deliberate speed” standard for desegregation, where the Court, confronted by massive resistance, backed away from its strong position taken in 1954, a definitive example? [The second portion of the Court’s Brown ruling came in 1955 and gave an ambiguous time line for the implementation of desegregation.] More recently, consider how leaders embraced affirmative action in the wake of [Martin Luther] King’s assassination and the riots that followed but then backed away when whites expressed great opposition. The Court now has struck down virtually every affirmative-action plan that it has reviewed.

American education for the masses has never been very good, and it isn’t very good today. Many whites are more interested in keeping their schools mostly white, with the assumption that whiteness equals quality. It often does not. For 30 years, most black organizations assumed that integrated schools were the key to effective schooling. That proved correct for some but horribly wrong for a great many black children. Americans are among the poorest educated people in any of the industrialized countries. As Michael Moore puts it, many Americans cannot read and many others who can prefer not to.

I see few signs that the country will have achieved racial equality in the next 50 years. Indeed, as indicated above, we are heading in the opposite direction. It is not impossible to imagine a crafty political leader who will convince the nation that blacks are responsible for jobs being lost to outsourcing or consolidation of companies. I can imagine arguments that the budgets for prisons are larger than for schools in many states like California and blacks are the majority of inmates in those prisons. Funds for welfare are disproportionately used by blacks (not true but generally believed). Blacks cannot be trusted to vote, and the vote should be taken away by any means available -- as happened in Florida in 2000. I could go on, but I think you see the point.

Alex P. Kellogg is a freelance writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.