Hardly anyone in Washington noticed this week when U.S. District Court Judge Wilbur D. Owens Jr. ruled that public schools in Macon, Ga., had satisfied court orders to achieve racial integration after nearly three decades of federal supervision:

"Racial imbalances in some schools raised as a concern by some members of the public are not the result of present or past discrimination on the school district's part," Judge Owens said in his ruling. ...

Lawyers representing both black and white parents and students reached a compromise with the Bibb County School System, which they presented to Judge Owens last month in hopes of ending the 1978 consent decree. ...

There was a time in America when busing was front-page headline news. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I remember watching TV news coverage of people rioting in places like Pontiac, Mich., and Boston, over court-ordered school busing. Deborah Simmons, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times, recently described the result:

Our public education systems have been stagnant since the 1970s, when riots, mandated school busing and other racially driven protestations turned America's cities into desperate pockets of haves and havenots.

In the past decade, however, federal courts have ended most of the busing orders that were imposed in the 1970s, and most American kids don't know anything about that era.

The day after Judge Owens ended the Macon desegration order, the Culture page featured an article about Ward Connerly, who has helped battle discriminatory racial quotas in college admissions, with important consequences:

Mr. Connerly's battle for colorblind policies has won him the admiration of Jennifer Gratz, who sued the University of Michigan when she was denied admittance in 1995. The lawsuit reached the Supreme Court as Gratz v. Bollinger, and in a landmark 2003 decision, the high court ruled the university's admissions policies were unconstitutional.

In 2004, Miss Gratz joined Mr. Connerly's coalition as director of state and local initiatives, and was a spokesman for last year's Michigan initiative. ...

"I grew up not thinking about skin color, and it was the University of Michigan's admissions policy that made me think about skin color," Miss Gratz said. "And I think that a lot of people my age grew up not thinking about skin color, but oftentimes the government forces us to think about it by these policies."

And Mr. Connerly adds:

"I think it's our generation's duty to get rid of this nonsense for them, since it's our problem. They're going to have enough duties, national security and everything else, than to be solving the inherited problem of race."

In the future Mr. Connerly envisions, the only place American kids will read about "this nonsense" is in the history books.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times