At last night’s Democrat debate, the candidates bloviated over the Supreme Court decision to limit the use of race in public schools. To hear them, you’d think they’d overturned a law against lynching.

Of course, making black voters feel aggrieved and powerless is essential for Democrats to win elections.

But Juan Williams, who is both black and liberal, disagrees:

With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worthy of a send-off with fanfare for setting off the civil rights movement and inspiring social progress for women, gays and the poor. But the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that focused on outlawing segregated schools as unconstitutional is now out of step with American political and social realities.

Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

And the fact is, during the last 20 years, with Brown in full force, America’s public schools have been growing more segregated — even as the nation has become more racially diverse. In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

Williams recalls a meeting he had with Thurgood Marshall in 1990 in which he asked:

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.

Chicago Tribute columnist Dennis Byrne writes that the court’s decision simply restores the intent of the 14th Amendment, which:

… in its historical context was directed at protecting the rights of African-Americans as they were emerging from slavery. No thought, it seems then, was given to the idea that more than a century later the rights of the majority also needed protecting.

Despite the Amendment’s historical context, its words can only mean that they have universal application: no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” [Emphasis added] How can that be read as anything other than a protection for every person? How can the words possibly be twisted to mean that some people are protected against racial discrimination while others are not?

If anything is jeopardized by Thursday’s high court decision, it is a number of nutty decisions following Brown, such as Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which found nothing wrong with busing children miles away from their neighborhood schools to achieve a bureaucratic will-of-the-wisp of complete racial integration. One faulty federal court decision followed another, turning federal judges into local school administrators, a job surely never foreseen by the Founding Fathers.