“No greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education.” Those words, written by Frederick Douglass, were quoted by Justice Thomas in his radical concurring opinion in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which opened the way for taxpayer-financed school voucher programs that are neutral between religious and secular schools. Much is going to be made in the next few days of the fact that the Supreme Court was divided when it handed down its decision in Zelman. But for many of us who have followed this struggle for years, that fact will little tarnish what is and will come to be widely seen as the greatest civil rights victory since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and one of the triumphant moments in the struggle for betterment of the American republic.

The court opened the way for thousands, maybe millions of poor and underprivileged children to take advantage of private and religious education the way so many of their better off counterparts do, a way that is as American as apple pie. In doing so it vindicated a school voucher movement that it has come increasingly clear, is in large part about rescuing poor children from a failing public school system. It is a battle in which a rear-guard fight for the status quo has been waged under cover of an Establishment Clause of the Constitution that cannot possibly have been intended by the founders for the use to which it has been put. The ruling will shake the foundations of the liberal hegemony the way Brown shook the foundations of the Jim Crow South. And, just as after Brown, the nation is likely to see a bitter campaign to resist the consequences of the High Court’s ruling.

Opponents of vouchers can be expected now to retreat to the shelter of the Blaine Amendments. These are relics of bigotry from the 19th century, when anti-Catholic animus was waxing and most of the states, including New York, erected constitutional barriers that came to be known as the Blaine Amendments, after a Republican speaker of the House, James G. Blaine of Maine, who was the point man for President Grant when the Hero of Appomattox bowed to nativist pressure and introduced a bill to amend the United States Constitution to block aid to religious schools. The bill failed in the Senate, but well over half the states passed like amendments to their state constitutions. New York’s Constitution was already amended by the time Blaine came along, and its amendment has survived efforts at reform and remains a monument to the fact that bigotry found a home in the Empire State.

New York’s is considered one of the strictest of the Blaine Amendments. It forbids the state from using public money “directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance, other than for examination or inspection, of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination.” So strict is New York’s Blaine Amendment that courts once determined that it barred the state even from transporting students on their way to religious schools along with secular students, and the state can only do so now because of an amendment made to the amendment. Yet even in New York the winds of change are gusting. Attorney General Spitzer issued a report in late May taking the position that New York could give aid to private and parochial schools in the form of computer loans, teacher training in Regents subjects, and special education without violating the Blaine Amendment.

The Spitzer report dodged the issue of vouchers, but now that the High Court has spoken it is time for a frontal challenge to Blaine itself. Before Zelman, such a challenge might have looked chimerical. But after Zelman, a retreat to Blaine by the opponents of giving poor children access to private, religious schools will look increasingly like the old style bigotry. For our part, we’re less concerned whether this next battle is fought in the courts or the Congress or the state legislatures than we are that it be fought and won. In Albany, the teachers unions have held sway for years. But the scale of the change that took place yesterday was seismic. Now that the cloud of constitutional uncertainty has been lifted, we’d like to think that the doors of opportunity could be opened to young people even in New York, the state whence Frederick Douglass issued the North Star and, we suspect, wrote the words that Justice Thomas cited to illuminate the depth of this struggle for liberation.