This year’s July 4 fireworks is extra special, combined with celebration of another landmark moment in American history.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most significant ruling in at least a century — that it is both wrong and illegal to have separate schools for white and Black children.

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling affirmed the nation’s founding principle that every American has equal rights under law.

Good schools for all American children is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The good news on this July 4 is that an extremely high percentage of Americans hold high the court’s Brown decision and oppose school segregation.

But hold the fireworks for a moment. Most Americans, Black and white, also tell pollsters they think schools are now racially integrated. That’s not true. In fact, America’s schools are more segregated today than they were in the late 1980s, the high point of school integration.

Black students “on average, attended 76 percent nonwhite schools, and Latino students went to 75 percent nonwhite schools,” Education Week recently wrote of a 2021 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

This rise in separate schools is happening even as the nation includes more........

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