"You could say the real story was Milliken," said Sugrue. "White opponents of school desegregation in the North won. Whites could move, and most did. They may have lost the skirmish, but they won the war. They continued to send their children to all-white schools with better resources than black schools."

In striking contrast, federal courts did turn up the enforcement heat on the Southern states at which the Brown ruling had been aimed. Schools there were ordered to undo the effects of their "separate and unequal" pasts, even if it meant mandatory busing.

Delaware was one of those states. After a long fight that the state lost in 1978, the Wilmington district was disbanded, cut into four wedges, and melded with its New Castle County suburbs. As many as 24,000 students, black and white, have been bused daily for desegregation.

Today, although one-third of Delaware's public-school students are African American, only about 8 percent go to schools that are 90 percent or more minority.

In National Assessment of Educational Progress tests from 1998 to 2003, Delaware's black fourth graders scored greater gains than any other state's in reading. Black eighth graders' math scores also leapt significantly, to above the national average for African Americans.

In Delaware's public schools, as throughout the country, the test-score gap between black and white remains. But it is smaller than in most states - and much smaller than in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

How much, if any, of that is attributable to the desegregation, no one has been able to say.

Delaware, however, might not be the model of classroom integration for long.

In the last decade, federal judges have ended most of the desegregation orders that flowed from Brown, declaring the states had done all they could to eliminate the "last vestiges" of segregation.

Delaware's was lifted in 1995. When districts did not stop their busing fast enough, the legislature in 2000 passed the Neighborhood Schools Act, forcing them to draw up plans to send children to schools nearest their homes.

That process is still going on, among predictions that it could jettison some schools back into racial isolation.

Being against neighborhood schools "is like being against motherhood and apple pie," said Nancy Doorey, school board president in the Brandywine district."But people had no information what would actually happen. It would create winners and losers" - the losers being "the children who are society's most vulnerable."

Fifty years after Brown, "separate" has become almost a given in the debate over equal education for minority children across wide sections of the country.

In the quest for high-quality instruction, and a way to close the racial achievement gap, the talk is less of mixing black and white than black and green.

"A lot of the thinking says is the way it is, and there is nothing to do about it," said Taylor, the civil rights lawyer."If you have public schools so isolated by race and class, how do you introduce fresh efforts of equal opportunity?"

One answer has come from New Jersey.

While it hasn't managed to achieve widespread integration in its schools, New Jersey has dealt with poor, mostly minority districts in a radically pioneering way.