Unity on Martin Luther King Day

Governor Deval Patrick criticized the US Supreme Court yesterday for considering stepping back from its 1954 decision banning segregation in public schools, a ruling that became a pillar for the civil rights movement.

In two separate appearances yesterday, including Boston's annual breakfast commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , Patrick said people are anxious to see whether the country would take a "giant lurch back in its long struggle for equal opportunity."

"The United States Supreme Court is on the brink of rationalizing justice right out of the law," Patrick, who was sworn in earlier this month as the second black governor in US history , told the hundreds of people gathered at the breakfast at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. "Their pattern seems to be a sort of pious acknowledgement of the existence of discrimination and then condemnation of any effort to do anything about it. I wonder how many of us know that in this term, right now, the Supreme Court is seriously considering overruling the Brown v. Board of Education decision. There's work left to do."

More than 50 years after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in schools in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the nation's highest court heard arguments last month on whether race can be considered when assigning students to public schools.

In the two cases being weighed by the high court, parents sued school departments in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, alleging discrimination after their children, most of them white, were denied entry to the schools of their choice because of their race. The school districts' plans, designed to prevent segregation along neighborhood lines, were upheld by federal appeals courts. Bush administration lawyers have taken the side of the parents in the cases.

The Supreme Court consideration of the cases has been criticized by civil rights groups as its ruling is likely to have an impact on school systems around the country that instituted racial guidelines, some of them after decades of court-ordered desegregation. In its 1954 ruling, the Supreme Court held that maintaining school systems that were "separate but equal" was unconstitutional.

An aide later said that Patrick, who headed the Justice Department's civil rights division during the Clinton administration, was referring to the high court's consideration of the two cases in his criticisms yesterday.

Senator John F. Kerry also raised the issue of the court's consideration of school desegregation in his remarks at the convention center. "We thought we'd resolved the problem in the 1950s of separate and unequal . . . with Brown v. Board of Education, which Deval just talked about, which is now at issue," Kerry said. "Here we are in 2006, and we're living not with the question of separate and equal, we're living with a school system that is institutionalized across the nation that is separate and unequal -- unacceptable."

At a noontime address at Faneuil Hall, Patrick stated that the civil rights struggle spearheaded by King for blacks during the 1950s and 1960s had grown to include other ethnic groups, such as Hispanics, as well as gays and lesbians. He reiterated his criticism of the initiative to place on the Massachusetts ballot a ban on gay marriage, which the Supreme Judicial Court approved in 2003.

The Legislature took the first step toward placing the initiative on the ballot earlier this month. "Today in Massachusetts, the use of the initiative petition process, to insert discrimination into the constitution, to limit individual freedoms, is unprecedented, and I'm going to do my best to encourage us not to do that," Patrick told reporters afterward at Faneuil Hall.

"Whatever your views about marriage equality, whatever they are, we are on the brink of using a ballot initiative to enable the majority to tell the minority just how much equality they may have," Patrick said earlier in the day.

State Senator Dianne Wilkerson and state Representative Gloria L. Fox, both of Roxbury, warned that the African-American community is now wrestling with other challenges beyond civil rights such as high homicide rates and severe health disparities. Wilkerson credited Mayor Thomas M. Menino for focus ing on those issues.

"This is some serious business and a black governor is not going to fix this all by himself," Wilkerson said, adding that Patrick's education adviser, Dana Mohler-Faria , had cited nationwide statistics that showed "94 percent of blacks who are dying by homicide are being killed by other blacks."

Patrick noted that nationwide voting rates are low in a democracy where people may vote with relative ease and that the unemployment rate for black males is twice as high as it is for white males. He also said that college-educated black and Hispanic men, as well as women , are paid less than comparably trained white men. He followed each point with the refrain, "We have work left to do."

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, said he had decided to appear with Patrick at the Faneuil Hall address because of the significance of an African-American being elected governor of Massachusetts.

" Dr. King would have been extraordinarily astonished to see a governor of Massachusetts who is African-American be elected," Dean said to reporters after the event. "Now, as the message of the day, I think, from all the speakers has been, we have made enormous progress in 40 years, but there is an enormous amount left to do."

April Simpson can be reached at asimpson@globe.com. Shelley Murphy of the Globe staff contributed to this report.