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School Desegregation, Attitudes Concerning

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had declared that separate but equal schools for White and African American students were legal. In the famous Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I) decision, the Court declared that the legally supported dual school systems (de jure segregation), which enrolled 40% of the nation's public school students at that time, were inherently unequal and that intentional government action supporting segregation violated the U.S. Constitution. Thus, the Brown decision laid the legal basis for school desegregation, the creation of schools specifically intended to serve both African American and White students. This entry traces the history of school desegregation since the Brown decision, as well as discussing public reaction to it and its impact on students.

Early Efforts to Desegregate

Opposition to desegregation by many Whites was fierce and prolonged, especially in the South where de jure segregation was widespread. Opposition included physical attacks on African American students, the stoning and burning of school buses, the founding of hundreds of private segregated academies, and even the closing of an entire public school system in Virginia to avoid having to desegregate it.

Initially, desegregation proceeded slowly, consistent with the Supreme Court's determination in Brown II in 1955 that segregation could be eliminated rather gradually, “with all deliberate speed.” However, considerable desegregation was eventually achieved in the later 1960s and early 1970s. Contributing to this change were laws passed in the mid-1960s that allowed withholding federal funds from districts excluding students from schools on the basis of race and provided large amounts of federal support for education. Also important were Supreme Court decisions in the late 1960s and 1970s requiring districts to replace identifiably “Black” and “White” schools with racially mixed ones, expanding desegregation requirements to regions of the country without existing dual school systems, and expanding coverage of desegregation orders to include Hispanics.

Thus, between 1968 and the mid-1970s, desegregation moved ahead rapidly in the South. Indeed, although more than three-quarters of African American students there were in 90% to 100% Black schools in 1968, less than one-quarter of them were in such schools by 1976. A significant amount of change also occurred in border states, which typically had existing de jure school systems. Less dramatic change occurred in most other regions of the country, where desegregation was generally de facto, caused by factors other than direct state action.

New Strategies for Big Cities

The possibility of desegregating many big-city school systems was undercut by the 1974 Milliken decision, in which the Supreme Court rejected a lower court's support for desegregation of the Detroit school system through a metropolitan solution in which White students from the suburbs went to school with African American students from the city. Specifically, the Court ruled that a remedy for segregation in a district could not involve other districts unless it was clear that the districts' actions had created the differences between them.

Numerous strategies were used to eliminate racially identifiable schools. These included the redrawing of attendance zones, the construction of schools in locations between heavily African American and heavily White residential areas, the pairing of two previously segregated schools to create two desegregated schools, controlled choice plans allowing students to select schools as long as their enrollment there furthered racial balance, and the creation of magnet schools designed to attract with the promise of a special curricular focus. The most controversial of these approaches, dubbed forced busing by its opponents, reduced or eliminated the connection between where students' lived and where they attended school by providing students with transportation from their often-segregated neighborhoods to racially mixed schools elsewhere.

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