by CQ Researcher

About the author: CQ Researcher, published by Congressional Quarterly, is a weekly publication that provides background information and analysis on timely topics.

African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minority groups have been underrepresented on college campuses throughout U.S. history. The civil rights revolution has effectively dismantled most legal barriers to higher education for minorities. But the social and economic inequalities that persist between white Americans and racial and ethnic minority groups continue to make the goal of equal opportunity less than reality for many African-Americans and Hispanics.

The legal battles that ended mandatory racial segregation in the United States began with higher education nearly two decades before the Supreme Court's historic ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In the first of the rulings that ended the doctrine of "separate but equal," the court in 1938 ruled that...