Resegregation

A Reversal of School Desegregation

Since the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ordered desegregation of public schools (Brown v. Board of Education), there have been government-sponsored efforts to desegregate public facilities, especially in the heavily racially segregated South. Despite a period of some public school desegregation since 1954, most public schools in the United States are racially segregated once again, with White students attending majority White schools, and Black and Latino students attending majority Black and Latino schools. Although there has been an increase in racial minorities in suburban schools, and in schools that have multiple races represented within a single institution, Whites continue to attend largely White segregated schools.

There are a number of reasons for resegregation in educational facilities. Central cities have experienced a significant amount of residential White flight since the 1950s. Whites living physically apart from minorities (especially Blacks and Latinos) are unlikely to attend the same neighborhood schools. Class and race are deeply connected, and many of the urban schools that the Whites left deteriorated in physical facilities and academic curriculum (and many have been closed altogether), because of a lack of local funding. Thus, even when White students live in school districts with a significant proportion of minority students at certain schools, many Whites attend private, parochial, or public magnet schools instead.

In addition, a number of U.S. Supreme Court decisions since Brown v. Board of Education have blocked efforts to desegregate suburban and urban schools through busing programs. Although earlier court cases (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education [1971] and Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 [1973]) allowed for interdistrict remedies to de facto segregation, in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Court ruled that large metropolitan areas (in this case, Detroit) did not have to combine school districts to desegregate, which would have mixed the largely White suburban public school students with the largely Black Detroit city students. In Milliken v. Bradley II[Page 1153](1977), authorization was given to provide compensatory funding for inner city schools, thus installing a return to “separate but equal” in U.S. public schools. Desegregation efforts were further hampered by later court decisions holding that desegregation rulings were temporary and that public schools could legally resegregate (Board of Education v. Dowell [1991] and Missouri v. Jenkins [1995]).

Neighborhoods

The term resegregation also refers to the result of a neighborhood that has undergone racial turnover. In the United States, this was especially prevalent in the post-World War II era, where previously all-White segregated neighborhoods were transformed into all-Black segregated neighborhoods, sometimes within a period of just a few years. Whites—especially in northern and midwestern cities—retreated from neighborhoods that were being integrated by Black newcomers.

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