American history is replete with paradigm-shifting, landscape-altering, game-changing moments. Brown v. Board of Education is one of them. Little of what we knew or understood before May 17, 1954 — 70 years ago next month — resembles what came after. Good thing.

Dismantling America’s system of educational apartheid was long overdue. The stigmatization of Black children as inferior to, or lesser than, white children was more than enough to call into question the moral currency of segregation. The Supreme Court would finally call that question in the Brown case. Separating schoolchildren based on race, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued, “affects the hearts and minds [of Black children] in a way unlikely ever to be undone.†We cannot abandon an entire race, he said. State-authorized and legally sanctioned stigmatization can no longer endure.

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Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.â€

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