Bob Thompson, in the Washington Post (May 18, 2004):

To invade or not to invade, that was the question. Once again, you had a bunch of Washington pundits and insider types shooting off their mouths about a decision that would get thousands of people maimed or killed and poison international relations for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, the eight panelists holding forth at the Shakespeare Theatre yesterday were talking about the 15th century, not the 21st. And the topic they were debating was King Henry V's decision to lead an English army into France in 1415, not President Bush's decision to send an American army to Iraq in 2003.

Or was it?

"Let's see what we have here. We have a king whose father had been a king. We have a king who spent a carousing youth," said industrialist and Shakespeare Theatre trustee Sidney Harman as he introduced the program. Harman went on to mention the "invasion of another sovereign nation" and to paraphrase the hoary advice of George Santayana that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Before long, Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens was quoting Henry IV's deathbed advice to the newly reformed future Henry V that in order to suppress domestic discontent, he should, in Shakespeare's words, "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels." MSNBC hardballer Chris Matthews was referring to the English longbows -- used to great effect by young Henry's archers in his immortal victory at Agincourt -- as "weapons of mass destruction." And moderator Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute (which helped put on yesterday's panel), was citing a bon mot by panelist and New York Times columnist David Brooks in which he'd compared the neoconservative advocates of George W. Bush's war to the English churchmen who gave their blessing to Henry's.

"Theocons," Brooks had called them.

The audience roared.

Such contemporary resonance was exactly what Isaacson had been hoping for when he came up with the idea for yesterday's debate.

John McManus, in Grade the News (May 19, 2004):

New Yorker Editor David Remnick had the stage all to himself Monday evening. But Tuesday during the John S. Knight Journalism Symposium, he faced off against three prominent journalists, a history professor -- and the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. Remnick's critique of the American press for turning from expensive foreign news to "non-fiction show business" featuring celebrity trials elicited agreement. But when he blamed the public for failing to pay adequate attention to serious journalism, Stanford Professor David M. Kennedy demurred with a little help from the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Prof. Kennedy, who like Mr. Remnick has won a Pulitzer Prize, likened the editor's indictment of the public the night before to Jimmy Carter's infamous "malaise" address. He paraphrased the former president: "I'm a good leader, but you're not cooperating by being good, attentive citizens."

"It's absolutely fatal to democratic theory to believe the public is incompetent," said Mr. Kennedy. "To whom else can we turn?"

Mr. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan professor of history, quoted an 1820 letter of Thomas Jefferson: "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education." News media, Mr. Kennedy said, must be more "clever" at making what's important compelling.

Editor Remnick responded: "I don't think at all people are incompetent. They are faced with a more difficult world than Thomas Jefferson faced." In Jefferson's time, he said, there was no "entertainment blizzard ... the narcotic effect of television at the end of a day.

"I feel sorry in a way for the news consumer," Mr. Remnick continued. "They are faced with a blizzard of choices and they are their own navigators."

Bob Egelko, in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 17, 2004):

Fifty years to the day after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, another court ruling will allow same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts today.

There are many differences between Brown vs. Board of Education and Goodridge vs. Department of Health Services - for one, gays and lesbians have not faced the same historic level of discrimination as African Americans - but the two cases have more in common than a date.

Both the nation's high court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court used their constitutional power to protect a politically weak minority from state laws that the justices considered discriminatory, directing legal and societal changes from the bench that would not have happened in a state legislature.

In the intervening decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has followed much the same path in rulings that legalized abortion and interracial marriages, outlawed organized school prayer, suspended the death penalty nationwide from 1972 to 1976 and required police to tell suspects of their right to remain silent and consult a lawyer. Last year, the court overturned state laws against consensual sodomy, a ruling that laid the groundwork for the Massachusetts decision on same-sex marriage.

Following the Supreme Court's lead, lower courts have taken control of prisons and mental hospitals after finding that the state was failing to protect inmates, another vulnerable group, from abuse.

The model for each case was Brown, which set a modern precedent for the judiciary as the guardian of rights - some constitutionally specified, some not - for the outcast, the downtrodden and the unpopular. The extent to which courts can, and should, perform that role remains a topic of hot debate.

"When the court advances liberty or equality in a way that the legislature won't, I think the court's performing its highest mission," said University of Southern California Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. "I believe that the courts make a positive difference in society."

To take two prominent examples, he said, abortion was illegal in 46 states on the day before Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, and legal in all 50 states the day after; private homosexual conduct was illegal in 13 states before the Supreme Court struck down those laws last year.

But John Eastman, law professor at Chapman University in Orange, said courts raise questions about judicial legitimacy when they second-guess elected lawmakers - particularly on subjects that are not mentioned in the Constitution, like abortion and gay rights.

Even in the Brown case, whose equal-protection rationale he supports, Eastman said the court should have confined its ruling to individual students and districts and left broader changes to the democratic process, where they would have been "longer lasting and more stable."

Such critiques are not limited to conservatives like Eastman. Liberal scholar Mark Tushnet's 1999 book, "Taking the Constitution Away From the Courts," advocated relying on political rather than judicial action to protect individual rights. And University of Virginia Law Professor Michael Klarman argues that rulings like Brown and the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts often backfire.

"By outpacing public opinion on issues of social reform, such rulings mobilize opponents, undercut moderates, and retard the cause they purport to advance," Klarman said in a recent law review article. "... In the short term, Brown retarded progressive racial reform in the South" by generating a fierce backlash, and Goodridge appears to be having the same effect, he said.

Brown-style activism on behalf of minorities has been rare in Supreme Court history. A different kind of activist court overturned minimum-wage laws and other economic regulations on property-rights grounds early in the 20th century, relenting in the late 1930s only after President Franklin Roosevelt proposed his court-packing plan to appoint additional justices.

The court laid the groundwork for the modern era with a famous footnote in a 1938 case suggesting that minorities who were not protected by the political process were entitled to special constitutional status. It took another 16 years, a procession of new justices and a wave of social changes to turn the judicial theory into dramatic reality.

Klarman attributed the Brown ruling to developments outside the court: World War II's effect on racial attitudes, a rise in African American political power and the growth of a black middle class, and Cold War politics, which made Southern white supremacy an international embarrassment.

"The justices in Brown did not think they were creating a movement for racial reform; they understood that they were working with, not against, historical forces," Klarman wrote, adding that the civil rights movement was the chief catalyst for change.

Other commentators said the court deserves more credit. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow called the Brown ruling "a huge motivating, encouraging force" for such watershed events as the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the sit-ins of the early 1960s. USC's Chemerinsky said the ruling ultimately doomed Southern segregation in all walks of life and represented a triumph for the court's power to subject laws to constitutional review.

Fast-forward a half-century. Today's Supreme Court is arguably as activist as the court that decided Brown, usually in another direction - overturning federal disability-rights and gun-control laws in the name of state autonomy - but occasionally in decisions reminiscent of the earlier court, like last year's ruling overturning state sodomy laws.

Courts in some states, like Massachusetts, are taking the lead in expanding constitutional protections - perhaps following the path of the California Supreme Court, which defied public opinion and decades of precedents by overturning a ban on interracial marriage in 1948, 19 years ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Both sides of the same-sex marriage issue are preparing for crucial tests on opposite coasts: in California, where the state Supreme Court hears arguments May 25 on the legality of same-sex weddings in San Francisco, and in Massachusetts, where the state court's ruling allowing gay marriages to begin on Monday could be undone by a 2006 ballot measure.

Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek (May 18, 2004):

I’ve been covering guerrilla wars for almost 25 years, and in every case I’ve been convinced that the only way to defeat committed insurgents fighting on their home ground, in the short and medium term, is with ferocious, unrelenting repression. Afterward, compromise with the insurgents can help finish the job for good, and the democratic process can be part of that. But first: force.

This is one of the points the best-selling military historian John Keegan makes in his new book, “Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda” (Knopf) His argument is that intelligence is helpful in any battle, but rarely decisive. “War ultimately is about doing, not thinking,” he concludes. And what you do in war can never be called democratic.

The first insurgency I covered in detail was El Salvador in the early 1980s. Back then, it was conventional wisdom among liberals that the activities of right-wing death squads were not only morally repellent, they were counterproductive in the fight against communists. They supposedly drove people into the arms of the rebels. In fact, the death squads were morally repellent. The slaughter they carried out, murdering and torturing many more of the innocent than the guilty, was nauseating. But it was effective. The urban infrastructure of the Salvadoran rebels was virtually obliterated, preventing them from launching any effective uprising for years to come. Salvadoran democracy, such as it is, was built on the corpses of those killed by the death squads. The party that has held the presidency ever since that war ended was founded by the leader of the death squads.

Much is made of guerrilla ideologies—communist, or Islamist, or Baathist. But the driving force in most guerrilla movements is simply dignity. Throughout history, long before any “-isms” were known, men fought against conquerors and occupiers because they found the presence of the foreigners humiliating. They used any means at their disposal to strike back, and as often as not they were denounced by the occupiers as bandits, savages and, yes, terrorists for doing so.

You discover the same pattern repeated over and over again, literally for thousands of years, in Robert Asprey’s “War in the Shadows,” a two-volume history of guerrilla warfare that came out in 1975 and really ought to be reissued now.

You read about a general in an occupation force saying, “There is but one way of inducing the violent rebels to become our friends, and that is by convincing them it is in their best interest to do so”—a none-too-veiled threat. Another complains that “the violence and passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibit dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders and violence of every kind, unheard of before.”

The sentiments are familiar enough in Iraq right now even if the syntax is not. But the officers quoted by Asprey were British—Lord Cornwallis and Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara—writing about Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox,” and other guerrillas in the Carolinas during the American Revolution. Cornwallis shattered the conventional American Army in the South in less than an hour at the Battle of Camden, but he couldn’t get rid of those guys in the South Carolina Low Country, who just wouldn’t play by the rules. The political leadership back in London was balking at the cost. The local allies Cornwallis picked up started to desert him. He couldn’t get the boots on the ground to do the job. And he just couldn’t understand why he couldn’t win.

Some readers will call this moral relativism (and they’re welcome to expound on the subject at Shadowland@newsweek.com). But it’s really just a matter of learning from the past experience of guerrilla fighting, and of terrorism. There are few mysteries here, unless we refuse to read the history at all.

Asprey calls the trap into which many conquerors, occupiers and colonizers fell “an arrogance of ignorance compounded by arrogance of power,” and he puts in historical perspective what he calls “the paradox of terror”: “By devious mental exercises conducted in the spiritual gymnasium of Christianity, colonizing powers defended the double standard: force used by themselves became benevolence; counterforce used by natives became terror. The conceit is clearly expressed in Cornwallis’s denunciation of Marion and his guerrillas during the American Revolution.”

Some 120 years later, the Americans themselves became an imperial power, when they defeated Spain in 1898 and took over all its restive colonies. Much more than any other conflict the United States ever entered, the pacification of the Philippines holds lessons for the war we’re fighting now. The good news: we won. The bad news: it took many years, wholesale slaughter helped us get the job done, and if the masses of Americans had any idea how gruesome it could get—if they’d had 24/7 news coverage, for instance—they probably would have turned away from the whole bloody enterprise.

At the battle of Mount Dajo in 1906, four years after Teddy Roosevelt declared major combat operations over, some “outlaws” in the Muslim south of the Philippines were attacked by U.S. forces: “The position was first shelled by a naval gunboat and then assaulted by the troops and constabulary,” according to a report issued by the U.S. secretary of Commerce and police. “The Moro women fought alongside the men and held their children before them, having sworn to die rather than yield. In this way a number of women and children were among the killed—an unfortunate but necessary evil.” About 1,600 died. “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag,” Roosevelt wrote to the commanding general after what became known as the Jolo Massacre.

A lot of “anti-Imperialist” Americans had seen this sort of thing coming, among them William Graham Sumner at Yale, who was one of his generation’s most influential political scientists. His long address, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” given in January 1899, may be the best thing written yet about the fight we’re in now. “The original and prime cause of the war was that it was a move of partisan tactics in the strife of parties at Washington,” he said. But there was no popular support. So “appeals were found in sensational assertions which we had no means to verify, in phrases of alleged patriotism, in statements about Cuba and the Cubans [read Iraq and the Iraqis] which we now know to have been entirely untrue.”

Sumner argued, as did Mark Twain and many others at the time, that imperialism undermined American democracy, not only in the conquered countries, but in ours. One of the most elegant critiques was made by a poet, Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful.” She also wrote an anthem to those slaughtered by Americans in the Philippines: “The flag that dreamed of delivering / Shudders and droops like a broken wing.”

Bryan Burrough, in the NYT (May 14, 2004):

As cherry trees blossom along the Potomac, members of Congress are castigating the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its inability to reign in heavily armed attackers who have struck at the heart of America. Critics say the bureau is incapable of discerning where the attackers may strike next, unwilling to work with rival agencies and unfit to fight what appears to be a new kind of modern war. Some call for its wholesale reorganization. The embattled director of the bureau pleads for more resources to combat the rising threat.

This may sound like May 2004, but in fact it was the crisis that gripped Washington 70 years ago. In May 1934, the armed attackers were not international terrorists but homegrown kidnappers and bank robbers: John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker and Bonnie and Clyde. It wasn't the war on terrorism. It was the so-called war on crime, and for the F.B.I., it was going very badly....

Today critics are calling for the F.B.I.'s reorganization to combat international terrorism. During the war on crime, the bureau underwent two separate reorganizations, one trumpeted in headlines, the other quiet and internal. Both were badly needed.

At the time of the Kansas City Massacre, the F.B.I. was an obscure arm of the Justice Department struggling to shake an unsavory past riddled with scandal. It had the task of handling a grab bag of minor federal crimes, including crimes committed on Indian reservations and the capture of escaped federal prisoners. Hoover's agents, most of whom were lawyers and accountants with little law enforcement experience, were not allowed to carry firearms or make arrests; if an agent wanted a suspect taken into custody, he was obliged to have a local policeman do it for him.

In the initial 1933 reorganization, Hoover radically altered the bureau's focus. Dozens of new agents were hired, given guns and sent in search of Midwestern bank robbers and kidnappers. With the exception of Machine Gun Kelly's apprehension in Memphis in September, the results were underwhelming. As the crimes of Dillinger and his peers increased in audacity, F.B.I. agents too often arrested the wrong people and allowed the criminals they did find to escape; at one point, Dillinger managed to elude the F.B.I. five separate times in a 25-day stretch....

On the surface, the F.B.I. appeared to dodge calls for a second reorganization that May. Behind the scenes, however, Hoover began a sweeping overhaul of key personnel, details of which have emerged only with the release of F.B.I. files during the last decade. The lesson of Little Bohemia, Hoover decided, was that his men were unsuited for modern gunfights. When an aide canvassed 50 F.B.I. offices nationwide to identify agents"particularly qualified . . . for work of a dangerous character," he came up with exactly 11 names. In desperation, Hoover turned outside for help, hiring skilled marksmen from police departments in Texas and Oklahoma.

To supervise his new gunslingers, Hoover replaced Melvin Purvis, the senior agent supervising the Dillinger and other manhunts, with a sad-eyed desk man named Samuel P. Cowley. Assuming command of the flagging war on crime on June 2, Cowley produced fast results with his deft coordination of far-flung agents, informants and investigations....

Defeating international terrorists in 2004 is certainly a far more complex mission than defeating bank robbers in 1934. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and their fellow travelers won't be stopped by better snipers or managers. Still, the challenge the F.B.I. faces today is much the same it confronted 70 years ago: finding a way to retool an underperforming government bureaucracy to combat an intimidating new danger to the public. The bureau did it to significant effect in 1934, and with luck, it will prove just as nimble again.  

Todd S. Purdum, in the NYT (May 16, 2004):

He was a champion debater, a good student, a strong and graceful athlete in a small, judgmental universe that prized such skills and knew him well. But for five formative years, John Kerry stood a step apart at St. Paul's School, gaining achievement more than acceptance.

Danny Barbiero, a middle-class boy from suburban Long Island who was Mr. Kerry's best friend, remembers how they made common cause in a boarding school full of Pillsburys, Peabodys, Pierponts and Pells. One day, Mr. Barbiero went to see a favorite teacher, the school's first black faculty member, and found someone else already there.

"I went into his apartment," recalled Mr. Barbiero, now an employee benefits consultant."And he said, `This is Johnny Kerry. He's just feeling a little out of sorts because he thinks people don't like him.' I said, `Who cares what people think! You're obviously a terrific person.'"

Mr. Kerry is 60 now and running for president of his country, not of his class. But to a striking degree, the personal qualities that propel him — and daunt him — are the same ones that buoyed and bedeviled him when he was 16 and striving to succeed at St. Paul's, then an austere all-boys enclave, the seventh school Mr. Kerry had attended by the time he arrived here in eighth grade.

Mr. Kerry has always been a pace apart in every world he has inhabited — from grade school to college to Vietnam to the Senate — moving forcefully and successfully through diverse milieus without ever being fully of them. To his critics, his ambition has always been just a little too obvious, his manner too calculating. To his friends, his tenderheartedness and complexities have been too little understood. Always and everywhere, his seriousness has stood out.

"I wish I could give you fresh material, but I can't," said Max King, another classmate, who went on to edit The Philadelphia Inquirer and now, by coincidence, is president of the Heinz Endowments, the wealthy Pittsburgh charity of which Mr. Kerry's wife, Teresa, is the chairwoman."He was at 13 and 14 as serious and earnest and idealistic as he is today, and very much like the person he is today."

If only because life is like high school, Mr. Kerry's adolescent experiences are worth examining in some detail. But for him, those years may loom even larger, since as the son of a diplomat, he grew up in various temporary quarters in America and Europe. From 1957 to 1962, his real home was St. Paul's, and it was here that enduring patterns were set.

"The culture was alien," Mr. Kerry recalled in one of two long interviews late last year."It had a language that I didn't know at first, kind of a body language. It was just a little different. I came from a very different experience. It took some learning."

In an 11th- or 12th-grade student production of"Julius Caesar," Mr. Kerry played a memorable Cassius, warning in his already sonorous voice,"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

"And he still has that lean and hungry look," said another classmate, Philip Heckscher, now a teacher and Chinese calligrapher, who played Marc Antony."He was a very good actor." He was also, Mr. Heckscher said,"a very focused person, and that might have made him seem ruthless to some. He was very focused in a culture where people were generally indirect about things, and that made him stand out a bit."...

Rick Hampson, in USA Today (May 13, 2004):

One of the most surprising things about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers is that so many Americans are surprised.

Decades of research and eons of history point to one conclusion: Under certain circumstances, most normal people will treat their fellow man with abnormal cruelty. The schoolboys' descent into barbarism in William Golding's classic The Lord of the Flies is fiction that contains a deeper truth.

And from Andersonville to the "Hanoi Hilton," no combination of circumstances turns us against our better nature faster than the combination of war and prison, whether we are acting on orders or on our own.

Charles Figley, a Florida State University psychologist who studied the experiences of 1,000 U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, describes himself as "shocked about people being shocked" by the reports from Iraq.

"About 25% of the vets I've talked to either participated in, witnessed, or were aware of violations of the Geneva Conventions" in Vietnam, he says.

Geneva is a long way from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where U.S. military police photographed each other tormenting hooded, naked Iraqis in their custody. Three face courts-martial, and four others could soon learn whether they will be tried, too.

President Bush has called the alleged offenders a relative few whose actions "do not reflect the nature of the men and women who serve our country." Still, many Americans wonder how people described as kind and decent by the folks back home could lapse into such extraordinary behavior.

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychologist who presided over the single most famous experiment in the field, blames the system, not the soldiers, who "were put in a situation where the outcome was totally predictable."

"It's not a few bad apples," he says. "It's the barrel that's bad. The barrel is war. That's what can corrupt, whether it's in My Lai or in Baghdad." ...

The two most famous experiments that bear directly on Abu Ghraib were separately designed and executed by two members of the class of 1950 at James Monroe High School in the Bronx — Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram.

In the early 1960s, Milgram was teaching at Yale and studying the impact of authority on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow orders to keep administering what they thought were ever more painful and powerful electric shocks to test subjects.

He hired local residents to participate in what he told them was an experiment in "teaching through punishment." They were the "teachers," and they would, on instructions, apply electrical shocks to the "learners." The director would take responsibility for any harm to the "learners."

What Milgram found surprised him: based purely on the instructions of a researcher in a white lab coat, two-thirds of the subjects kept raising the voltage levels, despite the howls (and eventually the ominous silence) of the learners in the next room. The teachers didn't know the electricity wasn't on, and that the learners were actors pretending to be hurt.

Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many relevant to Abu Ghraib: an acceptable justification for the behavior; an important role for participants; use of euphemisms such as "learners" (instead of victims); and a gradual escalation of violence.

A decade later, Milgram's old honors program classmate undertook an experiment of his own in a basement of the psychology building at Stanford.

In 1971, Zimbardo recruited 24 college students from around the San Francisco Bay Area to pose as guards or inmates in a mock prison for two weeks.

But, in contrast to Milgram, he gave them few further orders and supervised them only loosely.

Quickly, the guards became more and more abusive, the inmates more and more cowed. At night, when Zimbardo was gone, guards put bags over inmates' heads, stripped them of clothing and told them to simulate sex acts. Finally, after several inmates suffered emotional breakdowns, a shaken Zimbardo stopped the experiment after six days.

He concluded later that he himself had gotten swept up in the situation and didn't see what was happening until it was too late. "You could never even try that today," he says. "You'd be sued."

While Milgram's study stands for the proposition that most good people will sometimes follow bad orders, Zimbardo's suggests that sometimes good people don't even need bad orders — none or vague ones will do.

Milgram had strictly supervised his subjects, and they did the wrong thing — he called it "surrendering your agency," your self-control. Zimbardo had mostly left his subjects on their own, and they did the wrong thing. He called it "the power of the situation."

Over the years, the experiments have become famous. They are taught in psychology classes and have formed the basis for novels and movies.

Randy Scholfield, an editorial writer, in the Wichita Eagle(May 12, 2004):

Sara Hebel, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers) (May 10, 2004):

Fifty years ago this month, Vivian Malone Jones picked up the newspaper outside her front door and read a headline about the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.

"I went to my mother and asked her what did that really mean," recalls Ms. Jones, who was 12 at the time."I already knew I wanted to go to college. I knew I wanted to major in business. But this put something in your mind that you can really do this."

Almost a decade later, in 1963, Ms. Jones found herself at the center of a key moment in the desegregation of the nation's higher-education system. On a hot June day, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama's auditorium so that Ms. Jones and another black student, James A. Hood, could not enroll. President John F. Kennedy ordered the Alabama National Guard to remove the governor so that the students could register for class.

"That was one of the most important things I could have done," says Ms. Jones, who pursued a major in industrial relations. In 1965 she became the first black student to graduate from the University of Alabama."I knew this had been too long in coming for us for me to think about not attending," she says.

The decision in Brown, a case that combined lawsuits from five school districts, did not immediately lead to the integration of the nation's public colleges. But it laid the groundwork for black students like Ms. Jones to challenge the legality of a segregated higher-education system and helped spark the civil-rights movement that eventually led the federal government to require integration in public colleges.

In the half-century since the Brown ruling, many traditionally white universities have attracted significant numbers of black students, more black students are attending college, and states have provided new academic programs and facilities to improve the quality of their historically black institutions.

Yet inequities remain. Black students are underrepresented in doctoral programs, black faculty members and administrators are relatively scarce at many predominantly white institutions, and historically black colleges -- despite receiving additional resources in recent years -- are still trying to improve their reputations after decades of neglect by the states.

Eleven of the 19 states that once operated segregated public colleges have yet to receive official declarations from the federal government that they are desegregated. Some college officials and analysts worry that, as monitoring of those states winds down, resources and efforts to make opportunities for higher education fully equal will begin to wane....