With the 70th anniversary Friday of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, some of those reflecting on the occasion have been pondering why the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling didn’t work in desegregating public schools — or at least didn’t work for long.
An Associated Press article reported how U.S. schools have been steadily resegregating, as white families have shifted to private schools or moved to areas where the public schools are predominantly white.
Some of the reason for the resegregation has been the intransigence of whites, who said they couldn’t be forced to send their children to schools where the families didn’t feel comfortable — that is, schools where they would be in the distinct minority. They have spent the past 70 years proving it.
The Associated Press article also cites subsequent Supreme Court decisions that made implementing the Brown decision harder by nullifying some of the strategies the lower courts and school districts had devised to facilitate desegregation.
One aspect, though, that The Associated Press article ignored, as has other reporting I’ve seen over the years on the subject, is the unintentional but unmistakable role that the U.S. Justice Department and the federal judiciary have played in the resegregation of public schools.
Certainly, the federal government initially had to use a heavy hand to get the Brown decision implemented, since more than a decade after the ruling, many school districts — especially those in the South — dragged their feet or just refused to put into force any remedies to segregation. But later, after the resistance was put down and formerly all-white school districts accepted that racial integration could no longer be avoided, these districts pursued strategies that were designed to find a middle ground — integrate the schools but do it in such a way that white flight would be deterred or slowed. That often meant partial integration, in which some schools would be racially mixed but others would remain all or mostly Black. This was particularly the case in places such as the Mississippi Delta, where Blacks constituted the majority of the population.
Admittedly, some of these strategies were illegal, such as the zone-jumping to which Greenwood school officials would turn a blind eye into the 1980s, allowing white children who lived just outside the city limits to enroll at Greenwood High. Yet they worked — at least they worked if you believed it was better to have some integration than none at all.
Regrettably, the U.S. Justice Department wasn’t satisfied with half a loaf, putting a halt to the zone-jumping by demanding that students provide proof of residence. That resulted at Greenwood High in an unstoppable white exodus and a significant decline in enrollment. In 1985, the school had more than 1,100 students and a nearly 50-50 racial mix. This year’s enrollment is just 660 — a 40% decline over nearly 40 years — and is 96% African American.
Of course, the region’s population losses, which have been in the double-digit percentages for the last several decades, contributed to the enrollment drop. Still, though, one of the biggest drivers for families moving elsewhere has been precisely their discomfort with this community’s public schools.
In 2016, when the U.S. Justice Department and a federal judge were about to repeat this mistake in Cleveland, the last public school district in the Delta with significant integration, I wrote the following: “Federal efforts to further desegregate schools because earlier efforts didn’t eliminate segregation completely have only produced more segregation. The stubborn refusal of the U.S. Justice Department and the federal bench to accommodate reality has produced school districts that are Blacker, smaller and weaker, and the same for the communities where these districts are located.”
Eight years later, the experience in Cleveland has only further confirmed that conclusion.
The Cleveland district was in the “half a loaf” category. It operated two high schools and two middle schools. One of each had a roughly 50-50 racial mix, and the others were nearly all-Black. The students at the Black schools were free to transfer, no questions asked, to the racially mixed schools if they thought the offerings were better there.
Not good enough, the feds decided. They forced the school district to consolidate into one citywide high school and one citywide middle school. The result was predictable. White enrollment before the change in the separate but racially mixed secondary schools was more than 40%. At the consolidated schools the percentage is down into the low teens. Enrollment districtwide has dropped 20% in those seven years.
Ideally, majority-Black school districts would not have to make accommodations to whites. Whites would accept being outnumbered in some schools just as Blacks accepted it in the early days of desegregation.
That’s not reality, however. By refusing to be pragmatic, the feds have created a system in which most of the progress in integration is now occurring at private schools and community support for public schools is steadily weakening. As a result, minority children — both Black and a growing number of Hispanic ones — are often stuck in inferior schools. The response of more and more legislators is to give some of these kids an avenue of escape through charter schools, loose transfer rules and private school vouchers, while writing off the rest.
The intent of Brown v. Board of Education was to lift all boats. It has not succeeded.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
