The history of the twenty-five year period since the Brown v. Board of Education decision can be divided into three phases. The first phase was from '54 to '64, during which the Court applied its rule of "all deliberate speed." The focus was on desegregating the dual systems of the South, the products of de jure segregation, and all deliberate speed was translated in Southern accents to mean any conceivable delay. Phase two comprised the five years from passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 until 1969. Title VI of the act prohibited discrimination wherever federal funds were used, and for the first time the federal government began to take an active role. Phase three must properly be called the backlash phase, and it remains current today. Black young people are still discovering, due to a system that would not teach them to read or add, that the end of their education means the beginning of unemployment. People who are charged with responsibility for education must realize that in the long run, the cost of achieving justice is never so great as the cost of denying it. For that cost is measured by indicators such as crime, mental illness, human decay, and social disintegration. (Author/MLF)