The death of Linda Brown comes more than six decades after she became the central figure in the court case that outlawed racial segregation in US public schools. Has the country truly erased the lines that separate people based on their skin color, or does it simply exist in another form?

Brown died on Sunday at the age of 76. She was only nine years old in 1954 when her father Oliver brought forth a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education to overturn a court ruling in 1896 that allowed racially segregated schools. With the help of the civil rights group National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Browns and others were able to bring an end to the legalization of a racial caste system in the country.

However, many schools put little to no effort towards integrating black and white students over the following years, as civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had stated a decade after the conclusion of Brown v. Board of Education. 

The ruling even led to tension between local and national authorities, such as when the governor of the US state of Arkansas prevented nine black students from entering a previously all-white high school in 1957. They could only attend after President Eisenhower sent federal guards to escort them into the building.

In modern day America, segregation is alive and well, according to the US government. Although the nominal separation of races is illegal, institutional inertia has maintained divisions along racial and ethnic lines.

The US Government Accountability Office noted in a 2016 report that schools with 75 percent or more students who were poor, as well as black or Hispanic, had fewer math, science and college prep courses compared to other schools. The access to fewer educational opportunities is characteristic of poorly funded schools, which contain a disproportionate amount of black and Hispanic students.

Efforts to increase diversity, says the report, have faltered since schools reflect the demographic composition of the neighborhoods in which they reside, and such communities are fairly homogenous in terms of race and poverty. This means that for those who live in areas with high minority and impoverished populations, they tend to go to schools that are relatively deprived of resources and opportunities.

While the causes of the black-white achievement gap in schools and modern day segregation are usually attributed to the usual suspects of prejudice, income disparity or even lifestyle choices, one scholar says the US government is the culprit.

In a Guardian article, author Richard Rothstein deconstructs the “myth” that private prejudice from realtors and the like are responsible for segregated residential areas. Instead, he traces the origins of these invisible boundaries to government policy after World War II.

Imagine the classic American suburb with immaculate rows of one to two-story houses, each surrounded by a patch of grass that requires trimming every week or so. This was Levittown, a series of suburban housing developments that was intended for returning veterans and their families. Rothstein asserts that the developer was able to build the homes in the late 1940s primarily using low-interest bank loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration. The catch? The homebuyers had to be white.

FHA-backed mortgages had similar restrictions, giving loans only to white people. Rothstein notes that the houses bought with these loans were now worth 400,000 US dollars, while homeowners had bought them at what would be about 100,000 US dollars today. Thus, he argues, white homeowners had an extra 300,000 US dollars to invest in other areas of their lives, an opportunity that was denied to black people from the start.

In his statement issued a decade after the school desegregation ruling, King lamented how little had changed, with the majority of black students in the north and south of the US still far removed from their white peers. He had hoped not only for children of all racial backgrounds to attend the same schools, but for greater integration at all levels of society.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

As March 4 marks the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, his words are a stark reminder that change is still possible.

(Top photo: New York City Mayor Robert Wagner greeting in 1958 the teenagers who integrated Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas. /Wikimedia Commons Photo)