In this town outside the US capital, Beall Elementary School shares an anniversary with the court ruling that ended racial segregation in public schools.
At a time when the national media is full of gloomy reports about the failed promise of the famous ruling, this little school in Montgomery County, Maryland, has a different message.
On May 17, 1954, the US Su-preme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The case's name -- Brown vs. Board of Education -- came from Oliver Brown, who sued the elected local board of education in Topeka, Kansas, for not allowing his daughter to attend an all-white elementary school near their home.
Today, US President George Bush will visit Topeka to commemorate the anniversary of one of the shining victories for racial equality in the US. But there are positive examples even nearer home to the US capital, such as the Beall school in Rockville.
At the school's 50th anniversary celebration this week, the fifth-grade class pictures told the story. The all-white faces of teachers and students in 1954 gradually start transforming in 1960, with more and more black Americans, and eventually the children of families from places like China, Korea and India.
By the late 1980s, the school had become one of the most integrated in Maryland and even the nation -- and was increasingly a magnet for well-off suburbanites who wanted their children exposed to such cultural diversity.
The process was not as smooth as it sounds. The violence that accompanied the integration of what was then known as West Rockville Elementary School got no mention on the historical displays posted around the Beall school this week.
But on Thursday night, black, white, brown and yellow-skinned parents and students filled the school, mingling with apparent obliviousness to their communities' rocky history.
As if to jog everyone's memory, Warrick Hill, 77, had set up a little table to sell his book: Before Us Lies the Timber: The Segregated High School of Montgomery County, Maryland, 1927-1960.
Hill tells how until 1927, black students had no access to education beyond eighth grade unless they moved to Baltimore, 70km away, or into nearby Washington, the federal city.
However, the persistent efforts of the black community gave birth to Rockville Colored High School, a two-room schoolhouse. Given little public money, there were few amenities for the 40 students.
"There were no backs on the books. They were hand-me-downs," Hill recalled from his own years as a pupil at a successor to the colored high school in the 1940s. "When we reached the 10th grade, that was the first time we had new books."
In mathematics there were no books at all, and the teacher "had to be very creative," Hill recalled. "He wrote on the board, and I copied it. ... I kept the book on my mother's attic until it disintegrated."
Despite such adversities, Hill went on to teach math, resettling to another region where black educators could work. In 1960, when Montgomery County started hiring black teachers as part of court-ordered desegregation, he finally was able to come home and work in a mixed-race high school.
"Progress has been made," he said.
A flurry of academic studies published for this year's anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education tell a more discouraging story.
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