School Desegregation in the United States

By: Gary Orfield

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

School Desegregation in the United States

Policy of ending racially segregated education by reassigning students from segregated to interracial schools or by operating programs that produce interracial schools by giving students or parents a choice of which desegregated school the student should attend.

Desegregation refers only to the process of bringing students into interracial schools. Integration, by comparison, generally refers to the more extensive processes that make schools successfully and equitably interracial. It includes desegregation at the classroom level, fair treatment of students, improved human relations, and a curriculum that reflects and respects the cultures of the various groups of students.

Desegregation in the South

The 1954 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing legally imposed, or de jure, segregation in Southern schools, set in motion several decades of intense legal and political struggle over the subject of school desegregation. The desegregation struggles eventually spread across the country and came to include Latinos and other groups as well as black students. The contentious process eventually eliminated most aspects of a system that had prohibited blacks from attending white public schools in the South, the part of the country where most blacks lived. The legal principles that came out of this struggle transformed many other aspects of American life and helped trigger the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown found the system of “separate but equal” schools, which operated in seventeen states and the District of Columbia and which had been sanctioned by the Court's earlier decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), to be “inherently unequal.” The stage had been set for Brown by the decisions in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (both 1950), which struck down segregated graduate school arrangements. The Court's unanimous decision in Brown solidified this position by holding that the system of racially separated schools for blacks caused profound harm to the excluded, and therefore stigmatized, students.

In a follow-up decree to Brown in 1955, the Supreme Court called for the enforcement of desegregation “with all deliberate speed” and relied on the judgment of local federal judges to implement their order. These judges, however, often deferred to local school authorities who refused to comply without a specific court order for their community, so the judicial desegregation effort required hundreds of lawsuits to achieve very modest change. A decade after the Supreme Court's decision, 98 percent of Southern black students were still in completely segregated schools, virtually no whites attended previously black schools, and faculties remained segregated.

School desegregation accelerated only after pressure from the Civil Rights Movement led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and after the administration of President Lyndon Johnson began to use that law to force very rapid change in schools and other institutions. The law empowered the Justice Department to sue school districts and required the cutoff of federal aid to systems that resisted desegregation.

There was very intense opposition to all desegregation efforts in the South in the decade after Brown, but public opinion among both races became much more positive after desegregation was imposed in the late 1960s. After the implementation of the Brown decision, survey research showed a dramatic increase in white acceptance of integrated education, while black support for the policy stood at over 90 percent. Acceptance and support for desegregation as a goal for education has remained very high since. Although the South has by far the largest proportion of black students, it had the most desegregated public schools in the United States by 1970 and retained this leadership into the late 1990s.

Busing and Desegregation in the North

In 1971 the Supreme Court expanded on Brown when it decided in Swann v. Board of Education to require school desegregation in communities such as Charlotte, North Carolina, where residential segregation made it impossible to desegregate using only neighborhood schools. Noting that bus transportation was already an accepted part of the educational system, the Court supported a plan that required the transportation of students of both races to schools in other neighborhoods, a plan that became known as busing. The policy of busing met with overwhelming white opposition (around three-fourths opposed busing in the beginning) and a serious division within the black community. Some critics of busing were opposed to integrated schools in general, while others protested the loss of neighborhood schools. The national administration was hostile as well, as President Richard Nixon directed his officials to stir up white fears about busing for political gains. Nonetheless, busing was rapidly implemented in the South in the early 1970s, and most of the plans lasted into the 1990s, when the Court began reversing its earlier decisions.

In spite of hundreds of demonstrations demanding integrated schools in the North as well as the South, the school desegregation struggle had little impact outside the South for two decades. Northern officials defined their segregation as de facto (occurring even though no law required it) in distinction to the Southern system of de jure segregation. The Supreme Court, however, found evidence of Northern governmental policies of segregation in Keyes v. Denver School District (1973), which upheld the right of blacks and Latinos to desegregation in cities outside the South as well. Trials were held in many cities in the North and West. In every major case, plaintiffs succeeded in proving that the segregation was not de facto but was substantially caused by discrimination by educational and housing authorities in locating schools, setting boundaries, assigning teachers, providing courses, and in many other policies. Busing was often a significant element of the plans chosen by the courts to remedy this segregation.

In its 5-4 decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), however, the Court greatly limited the reach of the Swann decision by making it extremely difficult to desegregate across boundary lines separating cities from suburbs; the Court cited the importance of preserving suburban autonomy. Since many Northern cities already had predominantly nonwhite school districts surrounded by predominantly white suburbs, this decision limited the value and durability of desegregation. In his dissent to Milliken, Justice Thurgood Marshall held that limiting desegregation in this way would produce unstable and futile desegregation efforts in many big cities with few whites. Experience proved that Marshall was correct. Metropolitan Detroit, Michigan ended up as the most segregated metropolitan region in the United States, and the major industrial states of the Midwest and the Northeast remained the centers of segregation in the following decades. Meanwhile, the Southern counties where city and suburbs shared a single school district achieved the most extensive and stable desegregation.

Effects of Desegregation

There have been hundreds of studies of the effect of school desegregation. Most show academic achievement gains for black students, probably resulting in large part from the move from the more concentrated poverty of most all-black schools to less impoverished integrated schools. Segregated black and Latino schools are more than fourteen times as likely as segregated white schools to have concentrated poverty among their population. During the desegregation era black high school graduation rates tripled and college enrollment soared. There was also a substantial lowering of the national gaps on standardized tests and college entrance exams, although these gaps began to widen again in the 1990s. While the causes of these changes are complex, the claims made by some critics that the education of blacks was harmed during this period are incorrect.

Desegregation appears to have larger effects on some other aspects of education. Schools not only teach subjects, but they also socialize children, connect them with peer groups and networks, and give them experience in competition and cooperation with other groups. Students from desegregated high schools are more likely to go to college and more likely, once they get to college, to major in scientific and technical subjects and to graduate. These differences persist even among students who have similar test scores, perhaps because the experience of integrated schools prepares nonwhite students for the large white majorities they encounter at most colleges.

School desegregation was put forward by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights organizations as one part of a much larger program of racial change in the United States. From an early period, supporters of school desegregation realized that getting the children into the front doors of interracial schools was only the first step in attaining full access and equal treatment within those schools. Congress recognized this need when it enacted the Emergency School Aid Act, which allocated funds for the particular needs of minority students, at the height of the busing controversy in the South in 1972. That program was repealed, however, in 1981, the first year of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, in spite of studies showing substantial benefits to academics and race relations.

School desegregation was pursued vigorously by Congress and the president for only four years in the mid-1960s. The Supreme Court continued to press the issue only until 1974. The policy proved durable, however, and desegregation actually increased for black students through the 1980s. The reversal of the policy came primarily from an effort by conservative presidents to change the federal courts, which succeeded by the 1990s when the Supreme Court handed down three decisions drastically limiting desegregation.

Segregation, as measured by the percentage of students attending schools in which their own race overwhelmingly predominates, began to increase steadily for black students in the late 1980s, although they remained far less segregated than before the Brown decision. By 1996 segregation for blacks had returned to the level of the early 1970s. Many of the largest school districts were ending their desegregation plans. Latinos never experienced significant desegregation, except in parts of Colorado and Texas, and they became increasingly more segregated beginning in the 1960s. By the 1990s, even though they had become the largest minority group of school-age children, they were more segregated than African Americans. Studies of school districts that have returned to segregated neighborhood schools have shown dramatic patterns of inequality among the schools, strongly related to the concentration of poor children only in black and Latino schools under the neighborhood system.

It appears that the early twenty-first century, like the early twentieth century, will be a period in which the United States attempts to achieve “separate but equal” schools. There is no citywide model of success for this effort, however, either in the sixty years between Plessy and Brown or in recent years, so the issues caused by the segregation of the past are likely to recur.

See also Desegregation in the United States; Integration: An Interpretation; Segregation in the United States; Suburbanization and African Americans.

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