Fifty years ago last January, George C. Wallace took the oath of office as governor of Alabama, pledging to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting separate public schools for black students. “I draw the line in the dust,” Wallace shouted, “and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” (Wallace 1963).

Eight months later, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. set forth a different vision for American education. “I have a dream,” King proclaimed, that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Wallace later recanted, saying, “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over” (Windham 2012).

They ought to be over, but Wallace’s 1963 call for a line in the dust seems to have been more prescient than King’s vision. Racial isolation of African American children in separate schools located in separate neighborhoods has become a permanent feature of our landscape. Today, African American students are more isolated than they were 40 years ago, while most education policymakers and reformers have abandoned integration as a cause.

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