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Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their students played a pivotal part in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Private HBCUs, in particular, provided foot soldiers, intellectual leadership, and safe places to meet and plan civil disobedience. Their economic and political autonomy from the state enabled the institutions and their students to participate in activism without the constant fear of legislative retribution. Their private status did not shield them completely from the state's wrath, however, particularly when college aims collided with state interests. Some constituents argued that HBCUs should agitate for constitutionally protected freedoms; others maintained that HBCUs should shun politics and focus on purely educational concerns. Debates over the role of HBCUs raged on and off campuses. Those with the greatest degree of commitment to the movement faced severe penalties.

C ontemporary politicians, teachers, parents, and educational reformers are locked in a heated debate regarding the definition of social justice in education. Is it an education that will give students skills to alter the social order, or is it an education that will enable students to fit themselves into a higher station in that social order? Should the academic achievement of individuals or groups be the unit of analysis used to examine social justice? Can social justice be achieved through an education that promotes assimilation, or must it be an education for cultural maintenance (or something in between)? The debate can be loosely organized in two ideological camps. On one hand, social justice is the promise of equity and mobility through assimilation and the belief that such an agenda will return schools to a time in which they fostered togetherness under the banner of Americanization (Marshall & Parker, n.d.). On the other hand, social justice in education is reflected in a curriculum and school personnel who honor students' languages and cultures, foster appreciation of difference, and engage in a moral use of power that resists discrimination and inequity (American Educational Research Association, Leadership for Social Justice Special Interest Group, n.d.).This chapter uses the words of historical actors and historians to inform the current debate regarding how social justice should be defined and delivered. A history of social justice in education is useful for at least two reasons. First, these competing notions of social justice in education are not new. Tension between a belief in assimilation and the ability of individuals to climb the meritocratic ladder and the belief in a respect for cultural and linguistic differences and a flattening of the racial, ethnic, and linguistic hierarchy has existed since the start of the common school system (Tyack, 1993). Second, current educational reformers and others appropriate history and memory to justify certain avenues to social justice. As Hom and Yamamoto (2000) state, 195

The Brown decisions have become part of our collective American memory. Students know that the 1954 decision ended legalized segregation in elementary and secondary schools and rightly understand it as a benchmark in educational history. However, when pressed for information on the decisions, few have ever read the original court documents and even fewer realize there were two separate decisions, that four states and the District of Columbia were involved, and that the South fought aggressively for years to nullify their effect on school attendance. To teach Brown is to deconstruct simple notions of Civil Rights Movement triumphs and visions of a country eager to right historical wrongs. I incorporate Brown into three of my courses, but for the purposes of this piece I will focus on my Education for Liberation class since I believe that its comparative approach to Brown—as well as the entire class syllabus—teaches the worth of looking at educational reform through a variety of lenses.

If, as James Anderson stated, a nation committed to democracy and equality has every reason to be ashamed on Brown v. Board of Education 's 50th anniversary, why the commemoration and celebration (this volume, pp. 14-35)? An answer to that question is the mission of this chapter. By revising Anderson's challenge to examine the complex role of Brown in the nation's memory and history, the chapter investigates how the decision and the broader black freedom struggle are memorialized, why the story is told in a particular way, and the consequences of that portrayal in understanding the nature of American democracy and equality. An examination of the historiography of the movement and its judicial embodiment, Brown offers more than a nuanced understanding of the past; the way we write and understand history often tells us what we want to believe about ourselves in the present. In other words, our interpretations of history expose our conceptions of reality that, in turn, color the way in which we make sense of the world around us. Examining the particular tales of the black freedom struggle and Brown is useful in a volume dedicated to the question of what needs to happen before the close of another 50 years. In the spirit of the Akan word, Sankofa , "We must go back and reclaim our past so that we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came to be who we are today" ("About Sankofa," n.d.).To accomplish this task, the first section of the chapter examines two of the historiographical tales of Brown and the black freedom struggle in the scholarly literature. The conventional narrative and the revisionist narrative tell very different stories of the origins and goals of the movement, the major players in social reform, and the measures