Navy veteran Harry Briggs didn't come home from World War II to see his children walk six miles to the lone black school in Clarendon County, S.C., a ramshackle structure with no indoor plumbing or central heat and 10 teachers for 900 students.

So when the Rev. J.A. DeLaine organized a legal fight to desegregate the schools in South Carolina cotton country in the late 1940s, Briggs and his wife, Eliza, signed on only to lose their jobs. The DeLaines escaped with their lives after "night riders" shot at their house and then burned it. DeLaine's church burned, too, prompting the family to flee to New York.

"Retaliation was rampant: There were summary firings of maids; sharecroppers were evicted without harvesting their crops; and two people died, but Clarendon County and South Carolina will never own up," Joseph DeLaine, 71, the pastor's son, recalls a half-century later.

Fifty years ago, Prince Edward County, Va., wouldn't pay to bus 450 black students in shifts to the school it built to hold 180 pupils, so it built them tarpaper shacks.

"It rained inside those shacks, and those of us who sat next to the potbelly stoves burned up in winter while the rest of us froze if we sat near the walls. They tried to program us for failure," recalls John Stokes, 72, a retired educator who now lives in Lanham, Md.

Stokes, his twin sister and their friends organized a student strike in 1951 only to be advised by NAACP attorneys that they should sue to stop school segregation instead. Like the South Carolinians, they lost in lower court.

Yet the South Carolina and Virginia cases lived on along with three others from Delaware, Kansas and the District of Columbia that the Supreme Court combined under the name of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in the 1954 case that finally ordered a stop to school segregation.

Cheryl Brown Henderson is the daughter of the Rev. Oliver Brown, the Brown in Brown v. Board of Education. Henderson said that, while her family and others in the Kansas case "didn't suffer dire consequences as a result of their school-enrollment attempts, the same could not be said about the plaintiffs in the other cases. For many, their willingness to take a stand cost them dearly."

Earl Warren, the three-term Republican governor of California, became chief justice of the United States in 1953 and used his considerable political skill to ensure the Supreme Court spoke with one voice in ending segregation in public schools and national life. "You know how I feel about segregation," he told his son, Earl. "It isn't a question of what I'd like to say, but what the Constitution permits me to say."

And so at 12:49 p.m. ET May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren announced to the nation and the world that the Supreme Court "unanimously" agreed that the "separate but equal" doctrine that had held sway since 1896 was unconstitutional in education and no longer the law of the land.

Thurgood Marshall, the architect of the school-desegregation cases as head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was surprised at the court's unanimity as he sat in the court chamber that day. But he used it to full effect in future lawsuits to overturn segregation in transportation, hotels and restaurants, electoral politics and criminal justice. Later he became the first black Supreme Court justice in history.

The civil-rights fight had its foot soldiers, too, like Washington, D.C., barber Gardner Bishop and housewife Marie Smith.

Bishop thought black residents of the nation's capital shouldn't live under racial apartheid so he marched 11 black youngsters into the brand-new John Phillip Sousa neighborhood school to enroll instead of traveling across the city to a dilapidated elementary school so crowded that students attended in shifts.

When Sousa's principal refused, Bishop and the Consolidated Parents Group decided to sue, but they needed cash to pay the legal costs to get their case to the Supreme Court.

"My mother, Marie, would put dinner on the stove for us before heading out to raise money from bake sales and the like," remembers Alonzo Smith, 63, of Rockville, Md. "It was $1 here, $2 there."

Smith is co-curator of the Smithsonian Institution's "Separate Is Not Equal" exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown. He recalls that, in the Cold War world of the late 1940s and early '50s, the parents adopted Cold War language to challenge how America, "as so-called leader of the free world, could tolerate segregation in the capital of the so-called free world."

Cold War comparisons were not unique to D.C. desegregation efforts: Black students in Prince Edward County, Va., code-named their fight "the Manhattan Project" after the World War II project to build the atom bomb, John Stokes remembered.

Other foot soldiers included two families who challenged Delaware's three separate school systems, one for blacks, one for whites and one for American Indians, recalls Delaware State University history professor Bradley Skelcher.

The Claymont, Del., suburban schools wouldn't enroll teenager Louise Belton even though she lived in the integrated neighborhood. Instead, she walked by them to catch the bus for a 50-minute ride to all-black Howard High in a deteriorating part of downtown Wilmington.

Meantime, in the hamlet of Hockessin west of Wilmington, Sarah Bulah watched the school bus filled with children heading to the white neighborhood school. It drove right past her house and didn't stop to pick up her daughter, Shirley, a black child the white family adopted after reading headlines about the abandoned infant. And the school board wouldn't send a bus to take Shirley to an all-black school.

The Beltons and Bulahs sued and won in what Thurgood Marshall called "the first real victory" in the school-desegregation fight. Delaware Chancellor Collins Seitz's ruling presaged the Supreme Court's Brown decision two years later: He held that "state-imposed segregation itself results" in inferior education and ordered black students enrolled immediately in the best schools available, although full desegregation orders were still years away.

Shirley Bulah Stamps, who grew up to be a community activist and ordained minister, died last year of a heart attack at age 59. The congenital heart condition that made it hard for Louise Belton to walk more than a mile a day past the Claymont school to the bus stop caused a fatal heart attack at 43.

Belton's daughter, Andreia Brown, 47, is an instructor at San Antonio (Texas) College and acknowledges the role Brown v. Board plays in her daily life and the lives of her students. Because of it, "I teach at a very diverse school; I teach women as well as men, and I teach people with disabilities. All benefit because of civil-rights protections that grew out of the Brown cases."

Brown v. Board may have sparked a revolution, but the fight continues. Joseph DeLaine, a pharmaceutical executive who retired to Charlotte, N.C., says that "Clarendon County schools are just as segregated as they were in 1950."

He does acknowledge one difference: Congress last year awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, posthumously to his father and the Briggses as "desegregation heroes," sponsored by South Carolina's congressional delegation.

The fight also continues in the Old Dominion over Prince Edward County's decision to shutter public schools for five years starting in 1959 rather than comply with the Supreme Court order that it desegregate. Only after the court ordered the county schools reopened in 1964 did it comply.

Today, Stokes is one of many working with Democratic Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia to find a source of funding for scholarship grants to residents of Prince Edward County and elsewhere who were denied an education during Virginia's era of "Massive Resistance." The Republican state legislature has passed bills approving the grants but reports it has no money to fund the $2 million program.

"We still have massive resistance in the Virginia General Assembly when it comes to the unfinished business of Brown even though it's past time to heal the wounds and make sure those adults who got a fifth-grade education at best finally get at least the equivalent of a high-school diploma," Stokes said.

DESEGREGATION TIMELINE

Here are benchmark dates in the segregation and integration of U.S. public schools and public life:

1787: The Constitution is drafted with a compromise that apportions membership in the U.S. House of Representatives by "adding the whole number of free Persons" plus "three-fifths of all other Persons," i.e. slaves.

1850: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in the first documented decision dealing with school segregation, finds no reason to end black-only schools in Boston, prompting the state legislature to ban segregated schools in 1855.

1857: The U.S. Supreme Court hands down the Dred Scott decision holding that blacks are not U.S. citizens and thus cannot sue to enforce their rights.

1861-65: The Civil War leads to the South's defeat and ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, confers citizenship on all former slaves of African descent and entitles them to equal protection and due process of law. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, confirms that the right to vote cannot be abridged on account of race.

1875: Congress enacts the Civil Rights Act of 1875, giving the federal government the power to enforce legal rights of black citizens.

1877: The contested election of President Rutherford Hayes ends Reconstruction.

1883: In the first of a series of Kansas school-desegregation cases, the Kansas Supreme Court holds that Ottawa, Kan., and other "second-class" cities could not discriminate under the 14th Amendment equal-protection guarantee.

1883: The U.S. Supreme Court invalidates the Civil Rights Act of 1875, finding that the federal government has no authority to ban racial discrimination.

1896: The Supreme Court hands down Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding a Louisiana law requiring railroads to provide "equal but separate accommodations for white and colored races." The case is grounds for segregated schools and public accommodations.

1899: In its first school-segregation case, the Supreme Court refuses to make Augusta, Ga., close a school for whites until it reopens one for blacks.

1927: The Supreme Court lets a Mississippi school district require a Chinese-American girl to attend a black school instead of a whites-only school.

1938: The Supreme Court orders the University of Missouri's law school to integrate. The justices follow up by ordering desegregation of University of Texas and Oklahoma law schools.

1948: President Harry Truman orders integration of the military after soldiers of every race fight and die in World War II, ordering henceforth "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin."

1954: In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, combined with lawsuits from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Plessy's 58-year-old "separate-but-equal" doctrine, ruling it violates the equal-protection rights of black schoolchildren.

1955: The Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott begins when Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of a public bus. A year later, the Supreme Court outlaws segregation of Alabama public transit.

1957: Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus orders state National Guard troops to stop nine black students from enrolling at Central High School, prompting President Dwight Eisenhower to send 1,000 troops to Little Rock to escort the students into school. Farmville, Va., closes its public schools for five years rather than comply with Brown's desegregation mandate.

1962: James Meredith is the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Rioting breaks out.

1964: The Civil Rights Act is signed by President Lyndon Johnson, outlawing segregation of restaurants, lodging and other public facilities and providing protections against job discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin and sex.

1965: The Voting Rights Act is passed, giving blacks the right to vote and codifying Supreme Court rulings that guarantee "one person, one vote."

1968: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. The Supreme Court starts setting criteria to measure if school districts have met Brown's requirement to desegregate "with all deliberate speed."

1971: In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Board of Education, the Supreme Court first authorizes mandatory busing, redrawn attendance zones and limited use of racial quotas to desegregate schools.

1974: U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity Jr. orders students bused across district lines in Boston to achieve racial balance, touching off violent protests.

1978: A divided Supreme Court upholds affirmative action in college admissions if numerical quotas are not used.

1979: The Brown lawsuit is revived to force Topeka to do more to desegregate its public schools.

1991: The Supreme Court uses a case from Oklahoma City to underscore that busing is intended to be temporary and tells federal judges to lift court orders if school districts make good-faith efforts to end discrimination "as far as practicable."

1995: The Supreme Court strikes down the Kansas City, Mo., magnet-school plan, making it tougher for federal courts to order school-desegregation plans designed to attract white students.

2002: The Supreme Court ends busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg when the justices decline, without comment, to disturb a lower-court finding that the district dismantled vestiges of segregation. The Brown case ends in 1999 when a federal court judges Topeka in compliance.

2003: The Supreme Court lets colleges continue to consider race in admissions so long as affirmative-action efforts do not ignore individual qualifications.

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