In fact, Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who argued the historic Brown vs. Board of Education case, remembered feeling "so happy I was numb."

Today the mood is not so giddy. "Segregation in fact remained, and it persists to this day," a New York Daily News editorial said on Sunday.

"It is simply unacceptable that nationwide, more than four in 10 black and Hispanic students fail to graduate from high school, while almost eight in 10 whites get diplomas."

The failure of the Brown decision to deliver on its promise is reflected daily in the media we consume and in the makeup of our newsrooms. Still, the media can play a role in Brown's ultimate success.

It's a slow process. The American Society of News Editors found in 1978 that journalists of color comprised 3.95 percent of the total newsroom workforce. This year the figure stood at 13.41 percent. The goal is to have the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms nationwide equal to the percentage of minorities in the nation's population, which is now 33 percent.

At the Supreme Court itself, only one black journalist is assigned to cover the justices for a mainstream news organization, Jesse J. Holland of the Associated Press. Stephen Henderson, then of the now-defunct Knight Ridder chain, became the first only in 2003.

AP George E.C. Hayes, left, Thurgood Marshall, center, and James M. Nabrit join hands as they pose outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., May 17, 1954. The three lawyers led the fight for abolition of segregation in public schools before the Supreme Court, which ruled that day that segregation is unconstitutional.

Some of the reasons for the lack of progress are traceable to the very problem the Brown decision sought to address.

For five years, I edited Black College Wire, a news service that aims to improve the quality of newspapers at historically black colleges and universities, which produce 24.2 percent of the black students earning bachelor's degrees in journalism and communications.

Educators bemoaned students' lack of critical thinking skills, poor command of basic grammar and ignorance about current events.

At Howard University, journalism chair Phillip Dixon pointed out, "We have students who made their parents angry by turning down places like Harvard and MIT."

Some have problems with basic grammar, he continued, but compensated in other ways in high school.

"They've been taught there is one right answer," he said. Not that "there might be several right answers, and several ways to get to the right answer, and you need to find the one that works for you."

Then there are our colleagues in other parts of the media.

The "doll test" was one of the key pieces of evidence the NAACP laywers introduced in the Brown case. Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark showed four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color, to black children ages 3 to 7. When asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll.

The Clarks concluded that "prejudice, discrimination, and segregation" caused a sense of inferiority and self-hatred among black children, but it's fair to ask what role media images played.

Two years ago, Kiri Davis, then 16, interviewed African American teenage girls and replicated the doll test. She came up with the same preferences for white over black, and produced a documentary on her findings, "A Girl Like Me."

That same year, 2007, Byron Hurt produced and directed "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes," a documentary that aired on public television. It showed how corporations marketed rap musicians spouting negative, misogynistic, anti-education messages, while others were unable to secure contracts.

Is there a newsroom connection? Sure. The NAACP lawyers relied substantially on such scholars as John Hope Franklin, the towering historian who died in March at age 94. The ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs ignored Franklin's death, and only one national newspaper put the story on its front page.

That was The Washington Post, where a black journalist, Deputy Managing Editor Milton Coleman, was in charge that day. When I asked Coleman why Franklin's death went out front, he referred to the obit by Wil Haygood, also a black journalist, and said, "For all the reasons that were in Wil's story. It's that simple."

When The (Baltimore) Sun laid off 61 people last month including pop music critic Rashod D. Ollison, Ollison told me that "part of me feels a big liberation."

The stories he enjoyed the most -- examining how black music had become more nuanced and diffuse -- were being sacrificed to produce those about "the most stereotypical," he said.

Clearly, a diverse newsroom leads to more ways to cover the stories that define the lack of sufficient progress. They go beyond the education beat.

Children can't learn if they have problems at home, lack sufficient health care, a nurturing environment, a safe place to study and positive role models.

Who is setting the news priorities? Who is looking at the big picture? Are they people in touch with the problems they're writing about?

The Census Bureau last week estimated that 47 percent of the nation's children younger than 5 were a minority in 2008.

We should look at the way the country's demographics are changing when it comes time for downsizing newsrooms.

Perhaps the "race beat" shouldn't be downgraded on the newsroom prestige scale.

And in our outreach, perhaps we in the news media should be as concerned about the teaching of reading, writing and critical thinking skills in elementary school as we are among the college graduates who apply to us for jobs.

Richard Prince writes "Richard Prince's Journal-isms," an online column about diversity issues in the news business, for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Jouranlism Education. Prince also works part time for The Washington Post.