Wisdom died in 1999 at the age of 93. A Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, made Wisdom a federal judge, and a Democratic one, Bill Clinton, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his civil rights decisions. Thirty-five years after Wisdom's desegregation decision in Jefferson County, separate but unequal schools don't exist, at least in theory. But we use new language to talk about schools, and we do our best to not talk about schools in terms of race. Good schools are those where the kids do well on standardized tests.
Bad schools are the ones where the kids fail.
Trouble is, too many of us are blind to the difference in performance between the poor kids and the rich, and the obvious fact that black kids are overrepresented in the ranks of the poor. So we're still talking about race, without talking about it directly. And some of us have gone from giving up on busing to giving up on the public schools. In their place, we talk about giving kids vouchers to private schools. Except now we call this, often at the top of our lungs, affirmative action.