The children who were pioneers in the attempt to desegregate public education and exercise their right to attend school, to realize the promise of Brown v Board of Education, were met with persistent, violent white resistance in all regions of the United States.

      This happened in our lifetime. Two centuries into the establishment of the republic, one century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment to the Constitution, six years after Brown, Black students in the latter half of the 20th century were subjected to collective disadvantage as schools and communities across America pretended to comply with the orders of courts at all levels of the judiciary.

      But at the personal level, young people of color entered environments that were overtly and dangerously hostile. These courageous pioneers attempted to learn in schools that made little or no effort to welcome them and support them in becoming educated.

      Here are some of their stories . . .

      During our lifetimes, the public schools originally designed by white adults for white children have chronically failed Black students and students of color. It is one of the great failures of our generation.

       Whether we call it an achievement gap or an opportunity gap, the fact remains that the results of schooling in America, especially in the American south, are now and have been consistently and significantly different for white and children of color. The recent decades of piecemeal attention to inequalities in schools have not succeeded in overcoming the persistent effects of racial segregation in public education.

       A proper response now would be to re-examine the whole enterprise and re-imagine public education in the most inclusive ways possible. . . .

      I walked from the concession stand concourse through the tunnel and into that very ballpark on the mezzanine level. I was standing at the railing on the third-base side taking it all in: the iconic facade, the Bronx skyline beyond and the grass. 

      Up from my subconsciousness came a blubbering stream of tears. Then I saw the ghosts of my parents in the left-field seats where I had always pictured them on their 1946 date, when she had reached across him for a hot dog, blocking his view for just an instant while somebody hit something somewhere and with some significance. 

      No damage was done to their courtship, but he teased her about it regularly—and she rolled her eyes, for the next 30 years. …

Before we got to seventh grade no one paid much attention to what we were wearing to school. Then sometime around our 13th birthday we noticed that we had become junior members of society, and for the next six years we were expected to, and we expected ourselves to, look like something.

      Later, that something acquired a name: preppy; but at the time we didn't call our sense of fashion anything; we just wore it. It's tempting to believe that southern culture had something to do with our fashion statements, as the preppy clothing stores around the college campuses trickled down to the high schools.

      But for boys entering their teen years, southern culture included a new factor: there were those young ladies to be impressed. Guys in rumpled t-shirts and smelly sneakers were not likely to end up in the slow-dance embrace of an eighth-grade girl who had spent the hours between school dismissal Friday afternoon and after-the-game hop engineering her hair and picking out the perfect skirt and sweater combo. . . .