When the Supreme Court issued its landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 50 years ago this past May, liberals enthusiastically hailed the decision and conservatives deplored what they regarded as the Court’s reckless judicial activism. A half-century later, there’s been a remarkable reversal: Many liberals now disparage Brown’s significance, and many conservatives applaud the Court’s action.

In unanimously finding state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional, the justices in 1954 had to substitute their own moral convictions for the guidance they would normally have found in the text of the Consti­tution and subsequent Court interpretations of it. Their ruling had the unfortunate effect of encouraging the “abandonment of constitutional reasoning,” writes conservative commentator George Will in The Washington Post (May 16, 2004). But it also had the salutary effect of accelerating “the process of bringing this creedal nation into closer conformity to its creed.”

Gerald Rosenberg, of the University of Chicago Law School, writing in the American Political Science Association’s PS (April 2004), insists that Brown actually accomplished “not very much.” The “all deliberate speed” with which desegregation was ordered to take place proved not very speedy at all. A decade later, “virtually nothing had changed” for southern black students: Their schools were still segregated. Change did come eventually—two decades after Brown, 46.3 percent of black students in the South were attending white-majority schools—but only after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other actions by Congress and the executive branch. It wasn’t action by the courts that led to desegregation, Rosenberg maintains.

Attempts to end de facto segregation elsewhere in the nation “were less successful,” and they came to a halt in the mid-1970s, when, among other developments, resistance to forced busing “reached a fever pitch,” says Leo Casey, a former inner-city high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, writing in Dissent (Winter 2004). More recently, “there has been a trend toward resegregation.” In the nation as a whole, about 33 percent of black students were in “intensely segregated” schools (i.e., those whose student population was at least 90 percent non-Anglo) in 1988; that figure has since risen to 37 percent. In the South, the 44 percent of black students in white-majority schools in 1988 has fallen to 31 percent. “To a degree that few would have predicted a half-century ago, courts, communities, and civil rights advocates have all largely accommodated to racially segregated schooling,” Chris­topher H. Foreman, Jr., a professor in the University of Mary­land’s School of Public Affairs, observes, also in PS.

Brown is “a testament not just to the reaches but also to the limits of judicial action,” says Neal Devins, a law professor at the College of William and Mary, writing in PS. The Court’s ruling also owed less to the “masterful” litigation strategy pursued for decades by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People than it did to “good timing”: Seven years after Jackie Robinson desegregated major-league baseball, and six years after President Harry Truman ordered the armed forces and the federal civil service desegregated, the attitudes of many white Americans had changed. Only one third of white adults opposed segregated education in 1942; slightly more than half opposed it by the time of Brown. The popular verdict on the ruling: 54 percent approved, 41 percent did not.

The “major value” of Brown, writes Derrick Bell, a visiting professor at New York University Law School, in one of several articles on the decision in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 2, 2004), may be that it provoked white resistance—violent and well publicized—in Birmingham, Alabama, and elsewhere. The violence “appalled many who otherwise would have remained on the sidelines.” It wasn’t Brown that produced the Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, says Bell, author of Silent Covenants, a new book on Brown; it was thousands of courageous black and white demonstrators. For Bell and other disenchanted liberals, the lesson is that advocates of racial justice should rely less on judicial decisions and more on political activism. Because of the continuing resistance to “any but minimal steps toward compliance,” writes Bell, Brown is now only “a magnificent mirage, the legal equivalent of that city on a hill to which all aspire without any serious thought that it will ever be attained.”

But to Richard Kluger, author of Simple Justice, a classic narrative history of Brown first published in 1976 and reissued this year, the historic importance of the decision remains clear. “At the least,” he writes in the Chronicle, “we can say it brought to an end more than three centuries of an officially sanctioned mindset embracing white supremacy and excusing a massive and often pitiless oppression.”