Segregation, De Facto

Background

Documentation reveals that schools in many parts of the North were substantially segregated in the years leading up to 1954 and in the decades following Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). To be sure, most of this segregation was de facto, rather than de jure, and was aided by the small size of many school districts. The small size of many of these districts had the effect of guaranteeing that residential segregation would be translated into school segregation as long as boards could not be required to move students across jurisdictional lines.

In some states outside of the South, segregation carried the imprimatur of official policy. Perhaps the best, or more properly worst, example among the cases identified in this entry was Kansas, home to Brown. However, more frequently, high degrees of segregation, falling short of complete separation of the races, were maintained in more than a few Northern school districts, owing to housing patterns. Fueled by racial discrimination among homeowners, real estate brokers, and banks, residential de facto segregation was bolstered by government action and inaction.

In its most active mode, governmentally enforced residential segregation existed through legislation, such as the ordinance in Stockton, California, that required all Chinese to live south of Main Street. One of the most prominent tools for maintaining residential segregation, a California innovation of the 1890s that was used widely until shortly after World War II, was the restrictive covenant, the insertion into deeds of the promise not to sell a property to Blacks or members of other specified groups. More extreme was the practice of some suburban communities to exclude Blacks altogether. Combined with the selective location of public housing projects and the largely unchecked discrimination in the housing market, many large and midsize urban areas of the North became highly segregated under de facto conditions. Detroit's inner city epitomized de facto segregation; as late as 1970, this city had 14 suburban communities with populations of 36,000 or more, none of which had more than 50 Black residents.

Court Rulings

The U.S. Supreme Court first used the term de facto segregation in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971). Three years later, the Court addressed its first case of de facto segregation in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado (1973), a case that addressed the rights of students of Mexican ancestry. In Keyes, the Court held that even though the schools were not segregated by law or the state constitution, the board's actions led to the creation of a core of inner-city schools for minority students that were inferior to those educating children in predominately White schools in the rest of the city. Keyes is often discussed as a case of de jure segregation, even though it primarily focused on de facto segregation. Based on its finding that the board's action created a case of intentional discrimination, the Court concluded that school officials had to prove that they had not deliberately created schools that were segregated.

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