Originally published on May 16, 2004.

In May 1954, Thurgood Marshall was a newly famous African American lawyer flush from victory before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the justices had handed him and the nation a decision that arguably was their most important in the 20th century: Racially separate education was inherently unequal education, and the segregation of schools by law was unconstitutional.

With that, a door closed on a body of Southern state statutes that mocked the ideals of post-World War II America. And a door opened for the civil rights movement.

Marshall, the NAACP's lead counsel, told reporters afterward that classrooms nationwide would be integrated in "up to five years." He went on to predict that, by the 1963 centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, the country would be free of segregation.

It did not happen in five years.

It has not happened in 50.

As the nation marks the anniversary of the Brown ruling tomorrow, public education in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as in many Northern states, is dramatically segregated. Far more segregated, in fact, than schools today in the old "Jim Crow" states targeted by the high court in 1954. The latter, which include Delaware, are among the most integrated in the country.

"Brown dealt with the South," said William Taylor, a renowned civil rights lawyer who got his start working for Marshall that year. Elsewhere in America, "there were different stories."

One needn't leave home to find them.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania turn up near the top of the school-segregation list. A study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project puts them, respectively, in fifth and sixth place, behind Michigan, Illinois, New York and Maryland.

Here, one of every two black and Hispanic children goes to a school that is at least 90 percent minority, the formal threshold for "racial isolation."

The concentration of minorities in schools that are also usually poor and underperforming is so intense that integration, many experts suggest, may be a goal whose time has gone.

"The Brown decision ended a pernicious system of racial division by law; it did not end segregation in fact," U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said in a speech earlier this year. "There is an emerging de facto educational apartheid in this country. It is a tragedy and a scandal."

If the color lines are boldly drawn through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, they are starker still in the Philadelphia region.

The school-age population throughout the eight counties is more diverse than ever, with 445,000 white children, 208,000 African American and 54,000 Hispanic (the area's fastest growing ethnic group).

Yet in an analysis of the 166 districts, The Inquirer found that six in 10 black students and five in 10 Hispanics go to schools almost wholly minority. Four in 10 whites are in schools racially isolated on the flip side.