Ian Millhiser, Think Progress - The percentage of African American students attending majority white schools has been in decline since 1988, and it is now at its lowest point in almost half-a-century: school-segregation-chart-
In our national mythology about public school segregation, the Supreme Court holds a place of honor. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision. And that decision is now almost universally celebrated as the high point of the Court’s moral authority.
The reality, however, is that desegregation did not begin in earnest until a decade after Brown, and the Supreme Court started putting limits on integration a decade after that. America’s commitment to public school integration as a serious project was surprisingly brief, and it ended with the blessing of the same institution that handed down Brown.
As I explain in my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, the first ten years of Brown were either a testament to the Supreme Court’s inability to desegregate public schools on its own, or a testament to its unwillingness to do so.
One year after Brown, the justices handed down another unanimous decision in the same case holding that desegregation would only need to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” Brown II also left local federal district judges, many of whom owed their jobs to segregationist Southern senators, to supervise desegregation.
Even when judges were willing to integrate schools, moreover, white racists had another tactic they could deploy to protect Jim Crow: terrorism. Courts could only act if a black family brought a lawsuit challenging their local school district’s segregationist practices, but few families dared to do so with the threat of Klan violence looming over them. The first case seeking to integrate a Mississippi grade school was not filed until 1963.
Five years after Brown, only 40 of North Carolina’s 300,000 African American students attended integrated schools. Similarly, only 42 of Nashville’s 12,000 black students were in integrated schools in 1960. By Brown‘s tenth anniversary in 1964, only one in eighty-five black students in the South went to school alongside white children.
Then, a decade after the Supreme Court held that separate schools are inherently unequal, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which contained two provisions allowing the federal government to attack Jim Crow directly. One such provision empowered the Justice Department to file suits against segregated school districts, thus eliminating the need to coax black families terrorized by white supremacist violence into bringing these suits themselves. The second permitted federal officials to cut off federal funds for segregated schools.
1 comment:
Mr. Millhiser, I have't read your book but I will make an effort to find it and give it a read. I hope I'm not disappointed because your short essay here only addresses a headline, not causality nor effect. That is what concerns mean anytime I see someone with J.D. at the end of their name pontificating on serious issues because it too often from a legal perspective. The law is what society says it is, or so we're told. Unfortunately it too often becomes obfuscated by lawyers who try to make a philosophical point but typically end up giving it a tortured legal spin. We do have enormous problems with education, particularly regarding race, but they have been largely created by the legal community twisting and turning law to the advantage of specific clients rather than a holistic view that might actually solve a problem. I have a book project...will probably never see the light of day because its a text for teaching rather than something hawked on Span book television for the monosyllabic public consumption...that will address the fallacious treatment of race if not criminal treatment of education by the feds. Here is a suggestion for you...no charge. You're a lawyer...get rid of federal government sponsored racial segregation in education. Remove any reference to race in all documents such as registration and any of the one sided reports the Department of Education churns out that show 'Blacks' or 'African-Americans' or whatever term detour is. From the time a child enter the education system one of the first things they confront is...what race are you? What race are they? Where is the color chart? After all, the feds have so many and foolish definitions of race that an anthropologist would find it difficult to answer. Do away with race...we all look different, but there is no logical reason to put a tag on what we are. In Germany there is no reference to a persons race in education anymore. There once was....but it didn't work out very well for Jews and to their credit, Germany got rid of the social construct. Why doesn't America? Or is it alright for the feds to maintain segregation for the purposes of political control? Our culture should remain intact, and it will without any interference from the feds. And while we're at it, make the DoE and 'office of education' once again. America is multicultural and education cannot be legislated as a one size fits all from Washington. I look forward to reading your book.
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