The Brown decision of 1954 marked the beginning of a dramatic transition in American society. I attended segregated public schools in Houston. I remember segregated buses and water fountains marked “white” and “colored.” I remember the social codes that required black peoples to enter through the back door, never the front door. I remember segregated movie theaters, public swimming pools, beaches. So many degrading laws, rules, practices, customs, but only for black peoples.
So much has changed. After a period of years in which school segregation shrunk markedly, it has rebounded and intensified.
The UCLA Civil Rights Project has tracked civil rights issues for years. Here is its latest report on the state of school segregation.
Harming Our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown
Related Documents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The publication of this report marks the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In the immediate years after the Brown ruling, the effort to integrate schools faced many difficult challenges and progress was limited. But the passage of the l964 Civil Rights Act as well as a series of Supreme Court decisions in the l960s and early 1970s produced momentum towards increased desegregation for black students that lasted until the late l980s, as districts across much of the country worked to achieve the promise of Brown–integrated schools for all children.
As we mark the 65th anniversary of Brown, there have been many changes since the ruling, but intense levels of segregation—which had decreased markedly after 1954 for black students—are on the rise once again. In the 1990s, a series of Supreme Court decisions led to the end of hundreds of desegregation orders and plans across the nation. This report shows that the growth of racial and economic segregation that began then has now continued unchecked for nearly three decades, placing the promise of Brown at grave risk.
These trends matter for students, and for communities whose futures are determined by how the public schools prepare their students for a diverse future. Research shows that segregation has strong, negative relationships with the achievement, college success, long-term employment and income of students of color. At a time of dramatic demographic transformation, the implications of these trends and research are important for us to address.
White students are now a minority across the country’s public school enrollment, and they have been for a while, particularly in the public schools of the nation’s two largest regions, the West and the South. Since 1968 the nation’s enrollment of white students has declined by 11 million students while the enrollment of Latinos has increased by 11 million. There are now nearly three million Asian students and two million students who identify as multiracial. These changes are a direct reflection of lower birth rates among white households and population growth due to immigration. Latino students were 5% of U.S. enrollment in 1970 and 26% by 2016. At this stage, the vast majority of Latino students are U.S. citizens, but the Supreme Court’s Plylerdecision requires that public schools enroll all students regardless of citizenship status.
White and Latino students are the most segregated groups. White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white, while Latino students attend a school in which 55% of the students are Latino. Segregation for black students is rising in all parts of the U.S. Black students, who account for 15% of enrollment, as they did in 1970, are in schools that average 47% black students. Asian students, on average, attend schools with 24% fellow Asians. Black students attend schools with a combined black and Latino enrollment averaging 67%, and Latino students attend schools with a combined black and Latino enrollment averaging 66%. White and Asian students have much lower exposure to combined black and Latino students, at 22% and 34%, respectively.
Suburban schools in our nation’s largest metropolitan areas had only 47% white students in 2016, a ten-percentage point decline in a decade. About a seventh of these suburban students were black, and more than a fourth (27%) were Latino. There was considerable segregation within the suburbs, where both African American and Latino students typically attended schools that were about three-fourths nonwhite. White students in these same large suburbs attended schools where two-thirds of the enrollment was white students, on average. Our book, Resegregation of Suburban Schools, showed that few of the racially changing suburbs we studied had any desegregation plans. Doing nothing means accepting resegregation.
Even rural schools that were 70% white had stark differences in segregation. The typical white student went to a rural school in which 80% of students were white, while the typical black or Latino student went to a rural school with 57% nonwhite enrollment.
New York remains the most segregated state for African American students with 65% of African American students in intensely segregated minority schools. California is the most segregated for Latinos, where 58% attend intensely segregated schools, and the typical Latino student is in a school with only 15% white classmates. These numbers, especially in California, are related in part to sweeping changes in the total population structure as well as the termination of desegregation efforts, and reflect the changing realities of classroom composition.
The federal government has no programs devoted to fostering voluntary integration of the schools, aside from the small Magnet School Assistance Program. It has been decades since federal agencies funded significant research about effective strategies for school integration. Encouragingly, there are efforts for integration under state law and policies now in process in several states. Additionally, court-ordered and Office for Civil Rights-negotiated desegregation plans remain in a few hundred smaller districts, and there are dozens of local districts and regional desegregation efforts as well. We end with recommendations that research has shown can help achieve the promise of Brown, and that sharply reduce the number of segregated schools the Court described as “inherently unequal.”
This report is available on eScholarship: escholarship.org/uc/item/23j1b9nv
I grew up in Philly where there were all kinds of people. My neighborhood was mostly working class white, but it was transitioning from white to Puerto Rican. I lived in this neighborhood until I graduated from college. My schools were integrated. I still have a difficult time understanding all the segregation laws. They don’t make sense to me and never have.
I was very fortunate to have taught in an integrated public school where I taught mostly poor ELLs. I cannot even explain how fortunate my students were to have attended these well resourced middle class schools that provided a great deal of support to these language minority students and their families. Our teachers were wonderful, and many of our poor students attended college. The assistant principal of the high school was Haitian. She spoke Haitian Creole, French and Spanish as well as English. She would spend hours every year with the guidance department helping parents fill out forms for financial aid and scholarships. They would spend many evenings working to help these students figure out a way to pay for college. This community was amazing. They were truly a village that understood the importance of equity and were willing to go the distance for these young people.
Beautiful, Retired Teacher. As it should be.
I listened to much of the C-Span coverage of Sheila Jackson Lee’s legislative proposal for a commission to study the issue of reparations. Her opening statements are linked below.
As you can see, there was not unanimity about the merit of an inquiry. Some of the speakers were well-prepared to make a case for or against the legislation–which is NOT about dollars in compensation.
Speakers addressed education (not much detail), redlining and rules permitting location of environmental hazards in black communities, Congressional legislation giving power to states for oversight of resources (e.g., GI Bill eligibility).
One speaker tried to make everything about getting right with God and churchgoing. The economist was outraged at the implications of that position. There are viewer clips from the very long session.
DIane among many others has pointed to a host of factors beyond schools that have produced passive acceptance of segregation or active efforts to increase it, the latter aided by the current agenda of Trump/Devos mislabeled educational freedom (with a bit of help from the ghost of Milton Friedman).
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4803760/jackson-lee-reparations
I would be happy if they simply restored affirmative action. I don’t know what can be done about the past. Affirmative action helps minority students build a better future. I saw a show about affirmative action on PBS, and I was surprised by the number of African Americans that credit affirmative action with helping them secure a better future.
Government laws and policies built an infrastructure of segregation starting with Government policy of financing white segregated housing after World War II.
The pattern of Government financing supporting segregated housing referred to as “redlining” was interrupted briefly with passage of 1968 Fair Housing Law and fair lending laws.
While Government policy made housing discrimination illegal, enforcement waxed and, beginning with Nixon administration, waned and housing segregation remains today a major factor in the segregated by race and class experience of most of America’s students.
Fighting “intense levels of segregation” is an important fight, but should not distract from the bigger radical fight of seeking to repair the damage of years of our Government’s housing policy financing the Nation’s segregated housing.
America’s evil twins of segregated housing and public schooling can’t be successfully fought separately. They were birthed by Government laws and policies and are therefore a responsibility of our Government to pass desegregation laws and policies AND ENFORCE THOSE LAWS AND POLICIES!
Jim,
Richard Rothstein wrote a great book on housing segregation, which is the root of school segregation, called “The Color of Law.”
It vividly demonstrates that segregation was created, imposed and reinforced by local, state and federal governments.
Diane:
Richard Rothstein has long been one of my favored authors regarding the sociology of American education and his The Color of Law is what most of my remarks were built on.
My main point in my posting is that our Government’s racial and class segregation policies, post World War II, are the infrastructure of America’s racial and class segregation in housing and public education.
And, therefore our Government that created the problem with its segregated housing policies is responsible for fixing the problem its policies have created.
Richard Rothestein’s important book about our Government’s financing of its building of our Nation’s racial and class segregated housing, lays out the case for holding our Government responsible for having used Government policies and law in the creation of America’s segregated racial and class housing.
Agreed.
The segregation is much worse, even, in charters. Here, from a report by the Associated Press on its 2017 of segregation in charters versus traditional public schools:
“National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”
The Fordham Institute just did a podcast last month, hosted by Mike Petrilli, in which it tried to spin this as a good thing, saying that black students in the U.S. were more likely to have black teachers, which, they claimed, would result in better educational outcomes for black kids. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-benefits-of-having-a-same-race-teacher/id141300917?i=1000441417362
Aie yie yie.
If you strongly approve of Brown and of desegregation, which I do, you are going to find this stuff very, very disturbing.
A charter operator in Minnesota tweeted to me a couple of days ago that his school is 97% white and did I have a problem with that.
I replied that he was running a segregated school.
He has harassed me so often for criticizing segregation that I blocked him.
It is too late in our history to defend purposeful segregation.
Mitch McConnell recently said, infamously, that “no one alive today is responsible” for the effects of slavery and other past discrimination. But people today live with the economic, social, and political effects of that crap. Slavery and Jim Crow and the rest of the horrific history of discrimination down to racial profiling and calling the cops on people for barbecuing while black today are the Original Sin of this country, and it must be expiated. Reparations are a good place to START.
Biologically, race isn’t even a valid concept. It just doesn’t have a scientific basis. So, it’s bizarre that this late in our history, we are still dealing with the consequences of and having to fight the fight against racism. But we do. We must.
Culturally, race has been and continues to be extremely important. Consider the forms of music that grew up in the Americas: spirituals, gospel, blues (in its many, many varieties), ragtime, Dixieland, boogie woogie, jazz (also in many varieties), soul, R ‘n’ B, rock and roll, funk, hip hop, rap, calypso, soca, reggae, reggatone. (Even country and western music as it is known today–the narrative, ballady, “I was drunk the night my Mama got out of prison” stuff–was created by Hank Williams who learned to play and sing from black people. Listen to an early recording by him, something like “Rambling Man.” It’s straight-up blues.) Twelve million Africans were robbed over EVERYTHING THEY HAD–were robbed of their families, their cultures, their histories, their languages, their religions–were stripped naked and put into the holds of ships and brought to these shores and sold like animals for labor and sex–and 150 years later, there are jazz clubs in Beijing and people rapping on street corners in Ramala and rocking out in Iceland. Afro-Pop anyone? In other words, this is a people who had EVERYTHING EXCEPT WHAT WAS BETWEEN THEIR EARS–stolen from them, but 150 years later, their music–the music that grew up in West Africa–went back out and CONQUERED THE WORLD. In dance, it’s the same story. In literature, as well, for I think it doubtless the case that the most important American contribution to world literature has been signification. How diminished, how impoverished out culture would be without these gifts from a people so terribly, terribly wronged?
We must learn to be color-blind in our personal and political and economic interactions while preserving this astonishing cultural richness (and rediscovering all that was stolen).
We’ve got a long, long way to go. I am impressed with the young people I know, who just aren’t racists–who just don’t give a microbe on a hair on a rat’s tushy what color someone’s skin is–as I don’t. And that gives me hope. But we need to make right the great evil that we AS NATIONS, in the Americas, have perpetrated, the evil that plays itself out EVERY FREAKING DAY, STILL, in this country in the kid who can’t afford lunch and the young mother who is pulled over for driving while black. Reparations are never enough. But they are the least we can do.
cx: sold like animals for labor, as well as for sex
Reparations are the least we can do. Black people have given us this richness, have bestowed upon on us these many graces. And what have we given them in return. Not even common decency and fairness. Not even recognition of how we, as a nation, wronged them and still do. Reparation, noun. Back formation from the verb “to repair.”
Again, reparations are never enough. We can’t give Emmett Till back to his mother. But they are the least we can do.
Race is an artificial construct meant to classify people into certain groups. The DNA that separates one group from another is so miniscule that it hardly merits much discussion let alone all the social stigma and marginalization attached to it. It’s sad really because it’s much ado about nothing.
Younger people in general are more open minded about race than my baby boomer generation. I hope they learn from the mistakes of their elders.
Bob: thanks for mentioning musical contributions of Africans, but I would like to add one genre of popular music. Old time fiddle music, the dance music of a majority of the country, evolved into something uniquely American even as the African-American was a unique being due first to slavery, then due to segregation under Jom Crow.
Europeans arrived on our shores with a violin tradition from the British isles and Western Europe. In the north, where few Africans lived, most of the fiddling traditions were mostly influenced by the mixing of the various European traditions down through the years as German, Eastern European, and French Canadian influence.
But in the South, European, primarily Scott’s-Irish influence collided with African influences to produce a wildly different tradition. Africans brought the banjo from west Africa in their head, and soon hide was stretched over gourd to create the ancient ancestors of the banjo. When the fiddle and banjo were played together, the duo that was to define music for dance was born. The fiddle and banjo lasted in both African and European traditions until the guitar was introduced in the catalog culture of the later 1800s.
Often it was the African American fiddle bands that were preferred by white folks for their dances. Very often during Jom Crow, music was the thing that brought the races together. I have documented six Black fiddle and banjo players in my own county during the twentieth century, and I am relatively sure that they all regularly played with white folks in informal sessions.
Thank you, Roy! These cross-racial collaborations have been extraordinarily important. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jazz in its fullness was created by blacks and Jews, with a few others sitting in from time to time.
A case in point: Dave Brubeck was a recruit standing in a crowd at a Red Cross show when it was announced from the stage that a piano player was needed because the pianist for the show, for whatever reason, hadn’t shown up. Brubeck volunteered, and he was so good that his superiors ordered him to form an Army band. He did, and because great players were rare, this band was integrated. After the war, in the fifties, Brubeck toured with an integrated band, and he often cancelled shows when venue owners (hotels, etc) insisted on separate accommodations, entrances, dining facilities, etc., for his black bass player, Eugene Wright.
20th century jazz was MOSTLY about black performers improvising on on tunes from “The Great American Songbook” written by Jewish composers.
I was recently in Biloxi, MIssissippi where our daughter was in a summer camp for marine biology studies. While she was there, my wife and I went to art museums and wildlife refuges. One experience reframed my view of the history of segregation in the Deep South.
I have always had a picture of rural southern sons and daughters of former slaves being caught in the web of poor tenant farmers owing the country store so much that they could not leave. While there was a lot of that going on in the years from 1865 to 1920, there was a different narrative that described southern segregation under Jim Crow laws. Black workers moved long distances to ply trades that gave them a better life in response to the growing exploitation of natural resources and the growing of small town southern life that grew up during this period. In Biloxi, for example, a large African-American section grew up in response to the need for labor building houses and loading freight. Here as the Black population during slavery there was small, it ballooned as their labor became needed. Before this, blacks and whites tended to attend the one Catholic Church there. As the black population grew, they felt the need to build their own beautiful church that still stands.
Of course they threatened the whites with their rising numbers, and the Jim Crow laws that dotted the south grew up there too in response, making Jim Crow society more segregated than things had been under slavery. This was a phenomenon that was common across the south. Jim Crow segregated society more than slavery in some ways (please do not take this as a justification of slavery). In Biloxi, Jim Crow prevented any Negro from going within a certain number of feet of the edge of the surf, which gave rise to wade-ins during the civil rights movement.
One of the problems of school desegregation is that so many people saw it as the way to give people a chance at equality of opportunity. When this failed to achieve the desired result, schools took the blame instead of other parties responsible. At least part of this equation is that the nation has the perception that the problem was slavery. Even today, the reparations issue that has resurfaced recently couches its language in the idea that slavery was deplorable and recompense is deserved for those who,suffered because of it. Of course it was, but I am growing more and more convinced that Jim Crow did as much harm as slavery, for it was this system that segregated life in small towns across the south. Housing patterns in the north would accomplish the same thing when the massive northward migration sent hopeful Blacks into the growing cities where they found work after the 1924 quotas chocked off the flow of eastern Eurpeans who were the nativist bugbear of their day.
We had to desegregate schools in the wake of Brown v Board, but schools are just one part. We should never have expected that this job could succeed in a lifetime. Evil committed over centuries does not disappear easily. Luckily, there are people whose experience with other cultures give hope that one day we can all get along, and the dream will be a reality.
Thank you, Roy, for challenging that stupid, but common, simplification! The contemporary racists like such simplifications (thus McConnell’s reference to slavery) because it enables them to make the preposterous claim that this stuff is in the past. To be a person of color is to know that it is very much still present. I’ll give one example. I had a black friend who was a very successful corporate attorney who led an upper-middle class life. He was a fairly large man, physically. He described to me how, if he were not in his corporate uniform, white people would cross the street rather than walk past him on the sidewalk, and when he went into shops that sold men’s clothing, white clerks would watch him like a hawk and be far, far more solicitous to white customers. This friend was an avid collector of Jim Crow Era memorabilia. Why? He didn’t want us to forget, and he knew that de facto Jim Crow is still very much with us.
Roy: It is not just about all getting along. It is recognizing that Supreme Court decision of 1965 Brown v Board of Education and passage of 1968 Fair Housing Law outlawing housing discrimination are not being enforced and recognizing the harm that lack in rigorous enforcement of laws against housing discrimination creates.
I believe Roy, rather than being about getting along, the goal should be about working to get our Government to enforce housing discrimination to the point that the existing Government housing policies are no longer impotent and rigorous Government enforcement of Housing Discrimination provides a more just tomorrow for all.
Agreed. Poor word choice. However, we will not reach a place where we can deal with each other on friendly terms until all parties feel that fairness has come their way. The enforcement of laws may be necessary, but it will take far more than that. While enforcing the laws, groups that are now alienated from each per must come to some social reproachment, or all the laws in the world will serve only to set us up for the next confrontation.