After Brown

The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation

Charles T. Clotfelter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400841332
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown 's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision.
Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment.
Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.

CHAPTER ONE

Walls Came Tumbling Down

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the
feet of tyranny and I say segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever.
Alabama Governor George Wallace, 1963¹

The decision that Chief Justice Earl Warren read aloud in a hushed Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, is justly celebrated as one of the signal events of American legal history. In its wake, the public schools of a region would be transformed. The decision challenged one of the linchpins of Southern custom and law, the separation of the races in public schools. Unlike many events whose implications become evident only with the passage of time, most of the likely consequences of Brown v. Board of Education were appreciated immediately. The front pages of Southern newspapers featured defiant statements by elected officials, plus a few voices of resigned acceptance, but most observers seemed to understand, or at least to suspect, that the days of segregation were numbered. The decision itself anticipated resistance, of course. As testament to the delicate process of negotiation and revision that allowed him to obtain a unanimous vote, Warren crafted a decision full of moral weight but lacking any reference to enforcement. In fact, it would be another fourteen years (in the 1968 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County decision) before the court came to the aid of beleaguered federal district judges with an unambiguous order finally putting to an end state-sanctioned separate school systems.² As a piece of American social policy, few would doubt that it ranks among the most important, if it is not the most important policy of its century. For one large region, it brought about a change that few could have imagined would be possible, but its effects were felt throughout the country.

The purpose of this chapter is to lay out, in brief, the events, the public acts and decisions, that marked the formation and evolution of this policy, as a way of providing the institutional background to the quantitative descriptions of patterns and changes that follow. To students of education policy or constitutional law, much of this history is quite familiar, for it has been well covered in admirably thorough studies.³ Most readers, however, may find it helpful to preface their assessment of the quantitative aspects covered in the following chapters with a consideration of the major historical markers that punctuate the period under study. And to better appreciate the changes over this period, it is helpful to consider the state of education at the time the Supreme Court was considering the segregation cases before it in the early 1950s.

This chapter begins with a description of the policies regarding racial segregation of the schools both in and outside the regions ruled by de jure segregation. It then reviews the significant government actions over the following five decades, noting three distinct periods. To the chronicle of policies and events in these sections is added descriptions of disparities in resources, where they existed, between schools attended by whites and those attended by blacks. Such disparities are important to document because they emphasize one consequence of interracial contact or the lack thereof. Not only does segregation keep students of different races apart, it also has the effect of exposing students of different races to different levels of school resources if resource levels differ systematically by race.

DE JURE SEGREGATION

If one knows nothing else about public education at the time of the Brown decision, the one fact that is probably most familiar is that schools were segregated by law in the South. Although this much is true, it is not the entire story. For one thing, “the South,” for purposes of describing the extent of such segregation, included not only the eleven states of the former Confederacy, but also the six Border states and the District of Columbia. In addition, racial segregation in schools was official policy in a surprisingly large number of districts elsewhere in the country. Before documenting the events that provide the historical backdrop to changes in interracial contact after 1954, it is essential to describe the starting point.

Before May 1954 public schools in both the South and the Border states were segregated by law, but it was the South that would cling most resolutely to this system after Brown. What gave school segregation such importance in the South? Segregation in the public schools was merely one part of a vast and elaborate superstructure that was the segregated South. In his classic An American Dilemma, published in 1944, Gunnar Myrdal described the various aspects of the system. School segregation in the South was just one, though an important, manifestation of an elaborate social structure at the center of which was separation between whites and blacks. There existed numerous taboos against contact, or more exactly, an elaborate working out of the ways in which contact could occur. Except for otherwise unavoidable contact in the workplace, the market, the criminal justice system, and the home (an outgrowth of personal service work), contact between the races was minimized or otherwise highly structured so as to maintain the unequal social standing of the two races.⁴ Supporting all this was a belief system that justified behavior that would otherwise have been readily recognized as inconsistent with the moral sensibilities of whites—a belief on the part of whites in the inferiority of blacks. As Myrdal points out, this separation, plus the multifarious forms of discrimination on economic and political dimensions, helped to create conditions consistent with that belief.⁵ Behind the curtain of etiquette that circumscribed interaction between the races, to be sure, lurked the real threat of violence to enforce the system’s strictures.

As unjust, unproductive, and, frankly, bizarre as this system of apartheid sounds to the twenty-first-century American, it must be emphasized that this was the only system that much of the South knew or could comprehend. Although from the perspective of fifty years the demise of segregated schools may look inevitable and natural, from the perspective of Southern whites, desegregation was an almost unimaginable evil. In a spirited defense of segregation in schools, North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin wrote in 1956: “Racial segregation is not the offspring of racial bigotry or racial prejudice. It results from the exercise of a fundamental American freedom—the freedom to select one’s associates. . . . This freedom is bottomed on a basic law of nature—the law that like seeks like. It is one of the most precious of human rights, because man finds his greatest happiness when he is among people of similar cultural, historical and social background.”⁶ Ervin maintained that segregation benefited both races, and warned that school integr...