Unfinished business

CAMBRIDGE -- Some anniversaries have a bittersweet tinge, and that seems to be the case with Brown v. Board of Education. It's the main point of Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr.'s new book, "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education." In Ogletree's view, the landmark Supreme Court ruling against public school segregation, issued 50 years ago today, proved that justice can be done in courts of law, but the aftermath showed that, outside the courts, human beings have to make the laws work.

The title of Ogletree's book -- part memoir, part history, and part reflection on Brown's unfinished business and the persistent difficulty of race in America -- is taken from the high court's so-called "Brown II" decision of May 31, 1955. It backed away from immediate enforcement by ordering the Southern district courts to integrate public schools "with all deliberate speed."

That compromise, Ogletree said, "prevented the court from insisting on ending segregation forthwith, and empowered opponents to

resist integration by any means necessary," as they did throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the South, and later in the North. Segregation, in fact, still hasn't ended. "As much as we think we have legally solved the problem of race," Ogletree said during an interview in his memento-filled office, "as a practical matter we are still confronted with the same problems now that we faced 50 years ago, and it's shocking that many of the communities that were integrated after 1954 are more segregated than they were then. With all the concern about racial disparities and efforts to create equal educational opportunities, we still have 40 to 50 percent dropout rates among African Americans and Hispanics. That is an incredible mass of people still not living the American dream."

Greater Boston, it seems, is not a success story. According to "Racial Segregation and Educational Outcomes in Metropolitan Boston," a study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project released last month, seven out of 10 white students in metropolitan Boston attend suburban schools that are 90 percent white, and

more than three-quarters of black and Latino students attend school in Boston or "urbanized satellite cities." The study also found that "segregated minority schools in Boston are also high-poverty schools." "All Deliberate Speed" is largely Ogletree's own story. It's story of a talented boy who transcends family disadvantages -- Ogletree was the first high school and college graduate in his family. It's the tale as well of one close to the action: from the celebrated Angela Davis trial in 1972, to the 1978 Allan Bakke affirmative action case, to the Boston busing crisis, to the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, to the ongoing legal campaign to secure reparations for the survivors of the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Okla. (A federal judge in Oklahoma dismissed the case in March, but Ogletree plans an appeal.) Finally, it's a set of reflections on the extraordinary achievements of black Americans under segregation, and on the value of diversity.

With his measured cadences and powerful baritone, Ogletree, 51, is an eloquent speaker.

"All Deliberate Speed," however, has a quiet voice, and its poignant early theme is the love and support of family and mentors. Ogletree (his friends call him "Tree") grew up in Merced, Calif., south of the railroad tracks that effectively separated the white and black sides of town. His parents' families had come from Arkansas and Alabama in the 1940s. The first Charles Ogletree, his father, had married his mother when he was 41 and she was 17, literally under threat of murder by his future father-in-law. They were passionately involved, Ogletree says; "My grandfather wanted to make sure he did the honorable thing -- `get married or stay away from my teenage daughter.' " Though schools and public facilities were not officially segregated in Merced, there was a concentrated black community that Ogletree remembers fondly, with churches and businesses patronized by African-American residents.

Though his parents had had little education themselves, they wanted it for their kids, and Charles Ogletree Jr. -- he has three brothers and two sisters -- was gifted with a steady, quiet temperament and a passion for reading. He read books hungrily, and when his mother would tell him to turn off the light and go to bed at night, he would keep reading by moonlight, if possible. He was a good student, and in high school was elected president of the student body.

The family lived on welfare when there wasn't enough work -- for years, his parents did agricultural labor. The welfare check provided the only good food of the month, Ogletree writes: "chili dogs, Spam sandwiches, and occasionally, fried chicken." The family moved frequently.

"I was fortunate," Ogletree said. "My family had very little, but they never talked to us about being poor. They taught us to be resourceful. The love and appreciation that was communicated to me made a big difference."

His parents were divorced in the early 1960s yet remained friends, and his father was close by. The financial picture improved in later years; his mother got an administrative job at Merced Junior College. Poverty had sometimes caused embarrassment. Ogletree came home from first grade one day in new clothes provided by the school. He had been sent to the gym, told to take off his worn-out clothes, and given new ones to put on. He was puzzled -- he had not thought there was anything unusual about his clothes. His mother, who saw it as an implied rebuke of her parenting skills, was mortified.

While his parents had known the worst of racism in the South, for Ogletree it was a subtler presence. It was not until he was 11 and collided with a boy on a playground that he was called by the most common epithet for African-Americans. A well-meaning teacher tried to make amends with an awkward class discussion, but that awkwardness intensified the boy's discomfort.

"It was in that moment when I sat in that classroom as the only black student," Ogletree writes, "that I grasped the significance of my blackness and concluded that being black was not a good thing." African-American and Latino children were routinely tracked away from challenging math or science courses. In a school play about the founding of California, Ogletree was chosen to be narrator, since there didn't seem to be a place for black roles in the story.

School mentors extended his horizons, including his high school guidance counselor, who urged him to apply to Stanford University. At Stanford, he became a Phi Beta Kappa and chair of the Black Student Union. In 1975 he married a Stanford classmate, Pamela Barnes (they have a son and a daughter), and went on to Harvard Law School.

After law school, Ogletree went to Washington to work for the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, where he became director of staff training, chief of the trial division, and deputy director. He also taught law at American University and Antioch Law School. He came back to Harvard as an assistant professor in 1989 and became the Jesse Climenko Professor in 1998, and vice dean for clinical programs in 2002. In 1991, he led the legal team that advised Oklahoma Law School professor Anita Hill, whose explosive testimony raised questions about the fitness of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Ogletree is a success story in the post-Brown world, but he says he was deeply inspired as he learned how much African-Americans accomplished under segregation in the early 20th century, and how rich and vital their businesses, cultural institutions, and communities were.

"There was a sense of unity in those communities, where black people would lift each other up," he says. "There were times when I was working on this book, and it would be 2 o'clock in the morning, and I would say, `I wonder whether integration was a good thing overall for the black community,' and my wife would say to me, `It's time for you to go to bed. You need some rest.' The more I imagined this, the more I idealized it: Of course it was wonderful, but it was under segregation. It wasn't that they did it that way because they wanted to -- they had no choice. I wouldn't want to turn the clock back in any sense."

Brown and the labors of legendary lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as the body of law (such as the Voting Rights Act) that followed, eventually destroyed the Jim Crow system, in which segregation was enforced by law. Not that African-Americans don't still face overt and subtle racism, but those with education and means have choices in housing and education that their parents and grandparents could only dream of. Sometimes that complicates the question of diversity, its importance and value to society.

"Two problems I point out in the book," Ogletree said, "are white flight, which has been devastating to urban America, and also black middle-class flight, which has been discussed less but is just as palpably harmful to a community's vitality. When you lose your tax base, your intellectual firepower, economic influence, and leave these communities drained and dependent, it's very costly."

He cites affluent black suburbs in Maryland, outside Washington, in Detroit, and other places, and uses the phrase "self-selected segregation," but argues that it has nothing in common with the segregation of old. "The reality is that those are not closed communities," he said, "they are open to whites, but whites don't want to live there because integration is often viewed as a white community with one or two black or brown Americans, never as a minority community with one or two whites. Integration should mean it's open to a variety of races."

The work of racial justice is far from done, in Ogletree's view, and he is troubled that the nation's interest seems to have flagged. "The country is suffering from a serious bout of racial fatigue," he said. "No one wants to talk about it. They think we are doing better as a nation than we really are. We live in segregated neighborhoods, go to segregated schools, often work in segregated workplaces, worship in segregated churches, and we have become comfortable with a community that looks like us and less so with a community that looks very different."

He still strongly believes that racial diversity in public schools is as important to white children as it is to African-Americans, and hopes that pending plans for redistricting the Boston public schools will not allow resegregation. "If Brown meant anything," he says, "it meant that we can't go back to either malign or benign neglect of segregated education."

Not until you have diversity, Ogletree said, do you realize how impoverished you were without it. "When schools were all white," he said, "no one even recognized that something was missing. They thought everything they wanted was there. People want to go back to the `good old days,' but in the `good old days,' there was one train of thought, one body of knowledge, a narrow perspective on many things."

It's clear that whatever his frustration at the pace of progress in equality for African-Americans, Charles Ogletree still believes in the law. His principal heroes were lawyers: Marshall and Marshall's mentor, the eminent but unsung Charles Hamilton Houston. A 1922 graduate of Harvard Law School and the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, Houston became dean of Howard University Law School. Besides training Marshall and other prominent African-American lawyers, Houston conceived the strategy of attacking racial segregation through the courts, which ultimately led to the Brown decision. Ogletree has
just been named director of
Harvard's new Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Yet he believes direct action by individuals is also necessary and cites the principle that "from those to whom much is given, much is required." He chairs the BELL Foundation, an after-school tutoring service for underprivileged youths founded by black Harvard students, and last year gave $50,000 each to scholarship funds in Merced, Calif., and Washington, D.C.

He and his wife are cofounders and financial supporters of the Benjamin Banneker Charter School in Cambridge, which focuses on science and technology. Banneker's student body is 88 percent African-American, which Ogletree calls "an example of the unfinished business of Brown." He says the school is "an urban school with an open door to all, but not all will come." Though it has a diverse staff and faculty, Ogletree says the school gets few applications from white parents.

Despite his frustration with the pace of progress in the half-century since the Brown decision, Ogletree has high hope for the future, largely because of the young. "If you look at children under 21," he says, "there are incredible levels of racial respect and admiration. If we could take what young people have done -- their tolerance and respect -- and imbue those qualities in adults, we'd have a remarkably different society."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.