The legacy of a 50-year-old “legal icon” hasn’t lived up to its promise, a Harvard Law School professor told an audience Monday night in Kansas University’s Woodruff Auditorium.

That legal icon is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which aimed to integrate America’s public schools.

“The reality is we no longer experience legally enforced segregation,” Lani Guinier told an audience of 500 people. “That doesn’t mean that is what is happening.”

Guinier’s speech was the culmination of the second of four days of public forums in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown lawsuit filed against the Topeka public school district. She discussed “The Legacies of Race and Law in the United States.”

Guinier noted recent newspaper stories about how Boston public schools were less integrated now than they were 30 years ago. Moreover, she said the parents of blacks and Latinos also were taking their students out of that city’s public schools. Public education, she said, has become a bureaucracy with too many teachers who were only going through the motions to collect paychecks.

“Public education in the U.S., particularly in the urban but also in some rural areas … is in a state of crisis,” Guinier said. “It also is affecting higher education.”

Affluent whites got around school integration by building newer schools away from those that were integrated, leaving poorer whites to attend schools with urban blacks, Guinier said. Many whites who were left behind went on to be disgruntled adults, who blamed integration for keeping them from reaching the American dream of a rich and successful life, according to studies Guinier cited.

Americans must become more “racial literate,” Guinier said.

She pointed to Texas legislation that allowed students in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class to automatically be allowed to enter state universities. Now 5 years old, that legislation led to higher freshman grade-point averages among all races than were seen when admissions were based on scores from college entrance exams such as the ACT.

Although Guinier said she wasn’t advocating a 10 percent law in all states, she noted that the Texas Legislature improved a problem by looking at a race situation.

“I think that racial literacy is the honorable legacy of Brown v. Board,” Guinier said.

Guinier is the author of several books, including “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice.” She was the first black woman appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School.