Thirty years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus The Board of Education of Topeka, 1954, this paper discusses generally the impact of the Brown decision on education. It presents five major "lessons" suggested by the history of school desegregation. (1) The attack on bigotry and injustice must be fought on all fronts--with votes, political interest groups, multicultural education, economic planning, and with political consolidation. Litigation will not by itself solve problems with deep roots in social and economic conditions. (2) Liberty and equality are not polar opposites: equal opportunity must be seen as a goal necessary to all. (3) At present, in some ways, society is more segregated than ever: we have found ways to resegregate, not on specific racial grounds, but with results that are just as destructive to fairness and justice. (4) The costs of social change are charged always to those who are least able to afford the change. Desegregated schools are no solution as long as our politics, housing, incomes, class structures and churches are segregated. (5) The nostalgia and resentment that follow radical social change generate the pernicious myth that there is a great, good place in the past that we must return to because we have gone too far. The inertia and resistance to the impact of Brown, on the part of active opponents as well as those who yearned for more comfortable times, was underestimated. The Brown case illustrates a first principle: equality is a good thing that needs no defense. (KH)