Complete Coverage

Years of Entrenched Inequality

Growing up in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1920s, the historian John Hope Franklin attended the city's "separate schools." As cut off as he was from his white peers, though, Franklin was by no means unaware of how his segregated schools stacked up.

For student productions requiring a sizable stage, he remembers, youngsters from his all-black high school sometimes borrowed the white school's auditorium. At those times, the disparities in the two facilities were on full display.

"It was not at all ambiguous to me," says Franklin, now a professor emeritus at Duke University and the chairman of the advisory board for President Clinton's Initiative on Race. "I knew we were...