BROWN V. BOARD OF Education had been the first great step in giving equality to blacks, but nonetheless only one of the three branches of government had acted. And yet the law, it soon became clear, was not merely an abstract concept—it possessed a moral and social weight of its own. So it was that the country, without even knowing it, had passed on to the next phase of the civil-rights struggle: education. The educational process began as a journalistic one. It took place first in the nation’s newspapers and then, even more dramatically, on the nation’s television screens.
