Brown. It's become such a watershed in American life that people often refer to it with a single word: As in, "Brown changed the entire debate over public schools."

Strictly speaking, the name is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and May 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that drove a stake into the heart of Jim Crow society. The system may persist--and many recent studies show it still holds a tight grip in many communities--but never again would "separate but equal" be anything more than a hollow moral argument in public education or society at large.

As a two-part series in the April and May/June 2004 issues of American Teacher illustrates, the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision commemorates a key moment not just in American life but in the life of the American Federation of Teachers--one of its proudest moments. The AFT stood virtually alone among education organizations in filing three friend-of-the-court briefs supporting efforts to end separate but equal education. "Segregation in the field of education is the denial of education itself," the AFT's legal counsel wrote in a brief filed two years before the final decision.

For the AFT, this chapter was in character with an organization that has never been shy about pressing a point in the fight for social justice--often at great risk to the union itself. The AFT chartered the first two African-American locals in the early 1900s, a time when many unions closed their doors to black workers. In 1928, only 12 years after its founding, the AFT adopted a resolution calling for equalization of black and white teacher salaries and also for an end to discriminatory hiring practices. And in the 1950s, the AFT adopted a constitutional amendment denying entry to locals that discriminated on the basis of race, as well as a resolution expelling segregated locals--a move that overnight cut 15 percent of the union's national membership.

In the fight for equity in education, Brown was a start, not a finish. But it's worth remembering that it was a start that could not have happened without the courageous work of a long roster of individuals and organizations. The AFT was one of them.