Whether the endeavor has been successful is a debatable proposition, and one that never strays far from the headlines. After years of using affirmative action to accept more African American and Hispanic applicants, elite universities like Harvard were prohibited by the Supreme Court last year from adopting racial preferences in admissions. And diversity programs at the K–12 level have come under greater scrutiny as well, with plaintiffs around the country weighing lawsuits against equity-minded admissions policies at selective high schools. 

In his latest book, political scientist R. Shep Melnick investigates the course that desegregation followed over three generations — and where it fell short. 

, published by the University of Chicago Press, follows the legal maneuverings and unintended political consequences of one of America’s foremost social justice movements. Situating its subject within the larger struggle to extend democratic citizenship to women, minorities, immigrants, and people with disabilities, the book mainly focuses on the era between the exuberant 1960s and the anxious 2000s, when the victories of the Brown coalition seemed to be fading. 

In his work as , as well as the co-chair of the , Melnick has studied the development of what he calls the “civil rights state” as it developed over the 20th century: a colossal edifice of statute, caselaw, and regulatory language that America has built to shape its maturation into a more perfect union. His prior writings on the ever-evolving nature of Title IX have identified the junctures when judges and agency staffers, operating between the lines of federal laws, gradually pushed educational institutions in radically new directions.

Melnick’s treatise on desegregation adopts a similar posture toward federal courts and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (the precursor to the Department of Education). He argues that unelected civil servants, operating with insufficient guidance from the Supreme Court or Congress, embraced a spate of injunctions and racial balance plans — some still in effect more than a half-century later — that helped shatter the archaic social order of Jim Crow. But when the sweep of legal action turned northward, he argues, the political wars around busing in urban school systems halted much of the progress that racial justice advocates hoped to achieve.

In a wide-ranging discussion with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Melnick spoke about the never-ending demographic shifts in American schools, the birth of education reform as a successor to the desegregation movement, and what he deems the poor-quality social science that influenced the courts of Earl Warren and Warren Burger.

“If we could have schools with a good mixture of kids from all racial backgrounds, that would be terrific,” Melnick said. “But what’s the cost? How many hours on the bus? How much isolation of parents from schools? Are the backgrounds of the poor and affluent kids so divergent that they develop stereotypes or animosity?”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: Do you see desegregation as a failure?

No. I’d say that desegregation in the South was a tremendous success, and we have long-term evidence of that. It broke down the racial caste system, it was essential, and we should give a lot of credit to the courts and Congress for passing the Civil Rights Act.

In the North, it was a failure. The situation was different, and the school districts were different. We took the model that applied to breaking down a racial caste system and put it in effect where it did not apply. The long-term consequences there would seem to be null.

As a federal priority, desegregation also had ripple effects on school finance and other disadvantaged groups — such as English learners and students with disabilities — that were often quite good. But race is always the hardest nut to crack.

Can you take me through the earliest stages of desegregation, after the Brown decision in 1954? The historical consensus is that, largely due to resistance from local officials in the South and elsewhere, not a lot of actual integration took place through that initial period.

That’s generally true, but with one important caveat. In the border states, and in some states in the North where segregation was not strongly entrenched, there was very rapid desegregation. I’m talking about places like Kansas, where the Brown case came from, Kentucky, and Tennessee. An interesting one is Delaware, where there had been significant segregation, but they were able to quickly desegregate.

So there was significant change in those border states, in part because school segregation was not part of a broader system of racial segregation to the extent that it was in the Deep South. There also weren’t so many African American students, so the change didn’t seem so great. This shouldn’t be overlooked.

One of the key ideas you explain is the distinction between “colorblind” integration — the early idea that courts could simply strike down segregation laws and let schools do the rest — and the more assertive mandates that followed, which required authorities to actually achieve a specific balance of racial representation in classrooms. When the first, more incremental approach gave way to the second, was it essentially out of frustration that more hadn’t been accomplished by the mid-1960s?

Yes. The use of numerical standards for racial balance grew out of frustration with Southern school officials, who, often aided by judges on Southern district courts, used every trick in the book to avoid desegregating. The claim was, “We’re not using racial classifications, it just turned out that nothing changed!” 

It led to a sense among the courts, as well as the Office of Civil Rights — in what was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare — that we needed some standard to determine whether states were making good-faith efforts. That was the beginning of using statistics of racial balance to get some action, and while it was greatly overdone later on, my view is that it was entirely reasonable and necessary at that stage. 

They were simply saying, “You’ve got to show that you have at least 20 percent of African American students going to school with white students.” We needed some standard, and that was the turning point.

Was the critical threshold the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? That law included Title VI, which allows the government to cut off federal funding to any institution that discriminates on the basis of race or sex. My sense is that power wasn’t frequently used, but it was at least a credible threat against districts that didn’t move toward more racial proportionality.

The threshold was a combination of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. [ESEA] provided the carrot, in the form of more federal funds. Prior to that, there really wasn’t much to cut off. 

We think of Title VI and the threat of federal funds being withheld as the chief enforcement mechanism, but I don’t think that was actually true. The chief enforcement mechanism turned out to be the use of the judicial injunction — desegregation orders. What Title VI and ESEA did was create a civil rights office, which eventually became OCR, that had regulation writing authority. It was those rules they promulgated that were then endorsed by courts, and the courts used their own enforcement powers to follow through. 

There were essentially two choices: Comply now, desegregate, and get federal money; or stall, don’t get the money, and be subject to a judicial order later on.

You’ve written about the interplay between federal agencies and the courts, and how they can create a kind of ad hoc civil rights regime between their rulings and regulations. Did this dynamic play out with respect to desegregation?

That’s right. I’ve called it “leap-frogging” , and the same thing happened in the early days of desegregation. 

The big difference between those two situations was that in the 1970s, both the Nixon administration and Congress told the Office of Civil Rights to stay out of busing. After that, their role became much less significant, and the courts were mostly on their own. But that relationship between the courts and agencies was crucial in the prior years.

Would it even have been possible to crack the resistance of Southern schools without resorting to desegregation orders and enforced racial balancing?

I don’t think so. While I have some sympathy for the colorblind argument in general, if we’d never gone to some kind of numerical standards, nothing would have ultimately changed. It was absolutely essential.

In hindsight, would it have been possible to undertake desegregation differently in various settings — for instance, through racial balancing in the South, but with a more limited intervention in the North, where school assignment patterns were more the result of de facto neighborhood segregation? Of course, there were recalcitrant segregationists in the North — the comes to mind — but busing also met with so much animosity there.

There were opportunities for a different approach. The courts could have said, “If we find some evidence of discriminatory activity in the North, it doesn’t mean the whole panoply of federal interventions will apply.” Instead, they quietly eroded the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation, though they weren’t willing to say outright that they were abandoning it. 

There was also a lost opportunity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when was debating about the extent to which you had to eliminate all predominantly Black schools. One of the judges, Griffin Bell — who later became attorney general under President Carter — basically said, “We should do what we can to increase the number of Black students who go to school with white kids. But when you have severe racial segregation in housing, we’re not required to eliminate all predominantly Black schools. For practicality’s sake, we need to have limits.” 

He lost that argument, and it was the beginning of widespread busing. But I think it could have very easily gone the other way.

What about the legal rationale behind racial balance mandates, which has been criticized as condescending? Near the end of the book, you find statements from both Clarence Thomas and the critical theorist Derrick Bell — ideological opposites, or close to it — harshly critiquing the idea that African American students need to attend school with whites in order to learn.

If we could have schools with a good mixture of kids from all racial backgrounds, that would be terrific. My granddaughter goes to school in Berkley, California, and they seem to have accomplished that. I think it’s great, but what’s the cost? How many hours on the bus? How much isolation of parents from schools? Are the backgrounds of the poor and affluent kids so divergent that they develop stereotypes or animosity? All kinds of factors come into play.

One of the things that really bothered me while researching this project was the misuse of social science. There was this grand claim repeated over and over again in district courts, that if we had a 70-30 ratio of white and Black students, it would improve everyone’s education. That was based on incredibly . The courts were sold a bill of goods — the argument that, if we had whites and Blacks together, racial harmony would prevail. We know that wasn’t the case in some circumstances.

The problem was that we started by using racial balance to overcome years of de jure segregation and massive resistance, but then we claimed that it was an educational benefit on the basis of shoddy evidence. Going back to the Brown case, it surprised me to learn how much even the NAACP legal team thought it was shoddy and that they shouldn’t cite it.

One of the themes the book keeps returning to is the difficulty of pursuing desegregation in a country where both legal and educational authorities are so decentralized. Can you break that down for me?

The way in which kids are assigned to schools, where schools are located, all of that stuff is done at the local level. Even states have basically no control over it, so all the key decisions were local decisions. In the middle of the 20th century, even funding was mostly local because it was based so much on property taxes.

This was one of the main political reasons for integrating: If kids of different races are kept apart, the white kids can be favored for funding, but if they’re together, you’ll get fairer funding. Fortunately, funding has become much more equitable over time. As a matter of fact, the Urban Institute came out with showing that predominantly black schools actually receive a little more funding per-capita than predominantly white schools. 

With respect to courts, I’m hoping the book makes it clear that it’s a misunderstanding to think that the Supreme Court controls the federal court system. They don’t. They decide so few cases that district courts have huge power, especially over the nature of these structural injunctions that last decades. The Supreme Court basically said, “We don’t know what’s going there, and we’re not going to try to control it.” One of the things I discovered while working on this book was that decentralization is especially important in the enforcement of process. 

The Supreme Court, under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger, obviously decided major desegregation cases through the 1970s. But as you say, they mostly seem to have left the lower courts to appoint special masters and issue desegregation orders — some of which remain in effect more than 50 years later — without a lot of guidance from Washington. And it’s not as though Congress filled the gap either.

Congress didn’t give any guidance because it was so badly divided on this issue. Various presidents didn’t want to give any guidance because they realized that, whatever they did, they’d get criticized for it. 

The Supreme Court should have done more, but I think you’re right that Warren didn’t want to take ownership of this. After I finished the book, I found a quotation from former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. After the Brown case in 1954, he said, “I predict a generation of litigation if we send this ruling back with no standards, and each case has to come here to determine it standard-by-standard.” So some of the justices foresaw what was going to happen. 

I think Warren’s hope was to write an opinion in Brown that would unite people, and I don’t blame him too much for that. What I do blame the Court for is not being more clear in the 15 years after that case, and then for meandering all over the place in the ten years after that.

The generational bookend to Brown is probably the Milliken v. Bradley ruling in 1974. The Court rules that segregation across city lines is permissible in the absence of discriminatory intent, and that largely white suburbs couldn’t be compelled to participate in Detroit’s busing initiative. My sense was that Milliken was responsible for dramatically limiting the scope of desegregation efforts, but the book seems to argue that the politics of busing was becoming untenable either way.

The reaction against what was going on in Detroit was so severe that George Wallace in 1972. That says a lot — Michigan was the home of the United Auto Workers. Even its Republicans were liberal Republicans. At the same time, efforts to pass state constitutional amendments banning busing were gaining steam, and I believe they would have eventually passed if not for the Court’s ruling in Milliken. 

In other words, busing was so politically toxic that I think it would not have survived. That would have been a good time for the Court to reevaluate the standards of constitutionality for desegregation programs, but they didn’t. To some extent, they seemed to pull back a bit, but then expand more after that. It really shows what happens when you have close, shifting majorities on the Supreme Court.

Can you describe the afterlife of that generation of jurisprudence on desegregation between the 1950s and the 1970s? You write a lot about the hundreds of desegregation orders in place around the U.S., some of which really evolved over the decades.

It really took the beginning of the 21st century for most of those injunctions to get unwound. We’re down quite a bit over the last 20 years or so, though some of them still exist. One of the things I discovered while researching the book, much to my surprise, was that because it was so decentralized. Schools often didn’t know whether they were under a court order or not, and the courts sometimes didn’t know whether that order was still in effect. Here’s a great example of the extent of the decentralization: of the remaining injunctions, as did and , and they all came out with different numbers!

Part of the reason for the uncertain state we’re in now is , in which the Court really clamped down on the use of racial assignments in K–12 schools. But Justice Anthony Kennedy was the deciding vote, and he wrote his typically amorphous, “on the one hand, on the other hand” stuff, so there seemed to still be room for some racial assignment in public schooling.One of the consequences of the recent Harvard case [ending racial preferences in college admissions] is that that’s no longer true, and racial assignments are going to be disallowed no matter what form they take. 

That means that it’s just going to take more creativity for school districts to do what they want to do, which is achieve better racial balance. It will affect efforts to have more racial variety in exam schools, for instance. When you’re trying to reduce the number of Asian students at exam schools like Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, is that an example of racial discrimination? Those are the next big issues.

Would it be accurate to say that the education reform era was itself an heir to a desegregation movement that eventually had to transform? After the political and legal snares of the ’70s, you start to see more focus from both courts and legislatures on things like equalizing funding between schools, lifting state learning standards, implementing standardized testing, and so on.

You’re exactly right. Education reform grew out of frustration with the failure of previous efforts to provide better education to minority students, English learners and students with disabilities. We’d made progress with some of those, but it seemed to stall, and as pointed out, even average students were starting to fall behind by international standards.

In all the reforms from the presidency of George H.W. Bush through George W. Bush and 

No Child Left Behind, the plight of minority students was clearly central. And one of the most beneficial things that came from that period was testing, which allowed us to see how various schools were doing. I often tell my students that when the Every Student Succeeds Act was being negotiated in 2015, civil rights organizations insisted that there be very careful testing — and reporting of testing results — for minority students, because that’s the only way to tell which schools are doing well.

We’ve gotten much better at making school finance equitable. We’ve experimented with things like smaller classes and school choice, some of which seem to work and some of which don’t. But behind all of it is the idea that we have to improve opportunities for minority kids.

Here’s something you wrote near the end of the book: “It is understandable that half a century ago, federal judges and administrators believed they could use federal mandates to remake public education. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, we are no longer justified in taking such a leap of faith.”

Do you think the long story of federal involvement in K–12 education, typified first by Brown and more recently by NCLB, is coming to a close? Could it?

I think there are two possibilities.

One is that we will move back across the board. If Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I’m sure that’s going to happen. The other possibility, and what I’m hoping will be the case, is for there to be more experimental initiatives and more encouragement of states and localities to try new things. We should have more federal and state-level support for pre-K, which strikes me as extremely important. Kids enter the first grade with such divergent backgrounds that the most obvious place to begin is to make sure they don’t enter school way behind.

That’s a clear opportunity, and it’s pretty popular. Whether government will go in that direction or stick its head in the sand remains to be seen.

How do you think the desegregation period is remembered in our politics? The debate moment in 2019, in which Kamala Harris confronted Joe Biden about his opposition to busing in the 1970s, was so remarkable in that it felt like the party was totally revising its views of both the substance and the electoral risk of those policies.

Many of the talks I give on this subject are held in Boston, and what many people remember about busing is that it was a disaster in that city. But there are a lot of other school systems, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, where there is still a very bitter aftertaste from that experience.

At the same time, there’s clearly a sense among some people in journalism and the NAACP that desegregation was all working well until Milliken, when it was halted. Nikole Hannah-Jones has said something to the effect of, “It was working until racism stopped it.” That belief is relatively powerful on the Left because once you see everything in terms of racial identity, and once you see white supremacy as dominant, it’s a very easy story to tell. 

We’re seeing what happens when these superficial understandings of oppressor vs. oppressed play out in politics, and it can be a very useful storyline.

Are schools re-segregating now? I’m aware that K–12 demographics have become much more diverse in recent decades, and it’s actually hard to answer that question.

The answer is that it depends on what you mean by “segregation,” since we’ve never really defined it. If you measure segregation as how many white students are in classrooms with Black students, that number of white students has gone down. So if that’s your sole measure of re-segregation, you can make that case, but it’s a very poor measure.

There are other measures: To what extent are Black students in classrooms with classmates of other races and ethnicities? That has been going up because there are more Hispanic and Asian students. To what extent have white students been going to school with non-white students? That’s been going up. If, by “segregation,” you mean white students isolated in all-white classes, that’s been going down. 

The big factor here is that we have decreasing numbers of white students, who are no longer a majority, as well as increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian students. This is particularly true in large cities. So almost all of this is demographics, and very little of it is policy.

TOPEKA — Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park interpreter Jeff Tully says Kansas entered the union as an anti-slavery state in 1861, but in less than two decades the Kansas Legislature passed a law allowing cities of more than 15,000 residents to segregate elementary schools.

The law applicable to Topeka’s youngest, most impressionable children stayed on the books from 1879 until the 1950s.

“This was the state that wrote in our Constitution, ‘We forbid slavery,’ ” Tully said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “Yet, 20 years later, we’ll start segregating African American kids in primary schools.”

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Lawson Nwakudo, another National Park Service interpreter at the national historical site in the Monroe Elementary School, said that peculiar state law and the excellent Black-only schools in Topeka drew the interest of the NAACP, which was forming a legal strategy that sought to demonstrate to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court the harm inherent in a system of “separate but equal” schools and the necessity of disassembling segregated classrooms across the nation.

“Not only were these educators incredible, but they’re actually more educated than their white counterparts,” Nwakudo said of Topeka’s Black elementary school teachers. “The reason why the NAACP wanted to focus on Kansas, on Topeka, was because there was that level of equality. If they could prove there’s something inherently wrong with a place like Kansas … that would mean that there’s something inherently wrong with everywhere else.”

The consolidated court case, known as Brown v. Board of Education, resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision May 17, 1954, that declared state-sanctioned segregation of public schools to be a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of one of the century’s most significant court decisions, Washburn University in Topeka will present the play “Now Let Me Fly” at 7 p.m. May 17 in White Concert Hall. It examines the journey of heroes and heroines in the legal fight for equality in education. Admission is free with online ticket registration at or by calling 785-506-7768.

“There are many characters, many people who were involved with the Brown decision,” Nwakudo said. “This play gives you basically a feeling as to what that was like, and what their lives are like moving through and a little bit after the Brown case.”

The parents in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., who signed on as plaintiffs in what evolved into the Brown v. Board case placed themselves and their children in harm’s way, he said. The lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown, who had a daughter eager to enroll in the Topeka school closest to her home. She was denied access and was required to attend a segregated Black school further from home.

Nwakudo said the stakes were higher for other plaintiffs than they were in Topeka.

“There are some people who are being threatened and other people had their houses burned down. Whereas in Kansas, there still was possibly of an economic threat where your jobs can be threatened. That’s partially why 12 of the 13 complainants were housewives,” Nwakudo said.

Tully said the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Site organized a homecoming celebration for former students, staff and teachers at Topeka’s historically Black elementary schools from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 18 at the park’s headquarters in the former Monroe Elementary School. The invitees include those with ties to Monroe, but also to Buchanan, McKinley and Washington elementary schools in Topeka.

“At 12:52 p.m. on May 17, 1954, nine Supreme Court judges unanimously said ‘separate but equal’ was inherently unequal,” he said. “We thought Monroe would be the natural place to have this homecoming of sorts.”

The day’s program will include a roundtable discussion among former students from all four schools, followed by a sit-down lunch (registration for the meal is closed), musical entertainment and the taking of class pictures on the front porch of Monroe Elementary. There will be family and group activities on the north lawn. At any point during the day, visitors can contribute their stories and memories to an oral history project and the Kansas State Historical Society will be available to take digital images of documents and memorabilia related to the Topeka schools.

Nwakudo said the transition to integrated schools produced violence and all sorts of maneuvering to delay implementation of the Supreme Court’s orders.

“That is a major uplift for a lot of places, especially in the South, where these children could step away from these one-room shacks that were their schools. No electricity and no indoor plumbing,” he said. “There was a quite a bit of resistance. Places like Tennessee put forth a 12-year plan to desegregate their schools. Virginia tried to resist in any way they could, and actually ended up closing down a lot of their schools across the state.”

He said his message to visitors to the National Historical Park, especially school children, was that they had “power to make a positive change in our lives, just like their predecessors did. We can draw knowledge and strength from those past experiences, to galvanize ourselves to do more to do better.”

Tully said the National Park Service site south of the Kansas Capitol was among 428 National Park units in the United States. The site in Topeka measured barely 1 acre — a far cry from the 2.2 million acres of the Yellowstone National Park and the 1.2 million acres of the Grand Canyon National Park.

“But what happened in a building in Topeka, Kansas, along with four other court cases around the United States, was probably, in many scholars’ opinion, the single most important 20th century Supreme Court decision,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

The trend is unsurprising to lawyers and researchers familiar with the challenges of Brown’s implementation, who’ve sounded the alarm that the widespread practice of tying school assignment to childrens’ home addresses has  perpetuated segregation.

But one civil rights and education law expert maintains a sense of optimism, offering new ideas for how courts and state legislatures can take on integration efforts.

“There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to,” said University of North Carolina law professor Erika Wilson, “but often states lack the political will.” 

For years, Wilson, who teaches on and explores the intersections of race in education, has tracked how segregation has persisted. Across the country, modern school district boundaries mirror the boundaries of , where violence and threat of bodily harm against Black families maintained all-white areas. Modern day school district lines today are legally allowed to mirror the historically racist boundaries. 

Among other recommendations, she argues courts can and should take districts’ historical context into consideration when determining whether lines are discriminatory and infringing on student rights. States could also shift who is responsible for drawing lines, or use regional or county lines for districts, which would encompass more racially and economically diverse areas. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Wilson explores some ways segregation has taken on new forms, what states could take up today, and why abandoning integration to “just fix schools” for everyone won’t work in a vacuum. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: What do you think is missing in the current conversation around desegregating schools? Especially as many districts around the country are about to consider closures or consolidations and might be looking at attendance zone lines? 

It’s a tough question, but I’ve thought about this. One thing I wish that people would consider about not just school desegregation issues, but education in general, is the importance of public education to a healthy and thriving democracy, especially a multiracial democracy.

We really didn’t have a robust system of public schools nationwide until after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is in large part because the formerly enslaved and emancipated Africans made education a cornerstone of their efforts to become full citizens …. They understood, and I wish we understood as well, how important that is to cultivating citizenship on equal terms and allowing us all to live together harmoniously. 

It’s kind of a pie in the sky answer – but I do think it’s an important one. We’re seeing the rollbacks on public education, the push towards forms of privatization, at the same time as we’re seeing a complete erosion of democratic norms and commitment to democracy – I don’t think those are a coincidence.

Part of your work is explaining how violence maintained all-white areas and how district maps are now maintaining that exclusion. Can you talk about the ways that you’ve seen that violence shift over time to maintain these areas? Are there more quiet ways that you’ve seen play out?

One of the things I talk about is the way that violence becomes ensconced within geography. And how, at least with respect to schools, we think of geography as race-neutral, unattached from that history of violence against Black bodies in particular.

When you think about modern ways that this manifests itself, the rigid maintenance of school district boundary lines around areas that we know are formerly whites-only sundown towns are an example. 

A less obvious example might be the way that we see zoning laws in these areas… they’re not going to build the kind of multifamily housing or high higher density housing that would attract people who are not predominantly white and/or affluent.

Those are certainly examples of the ways the violence that was used to create these all-white areas continues unabated, in a way that’s completely lawful, and in a way that people are hesitant to associate with forms of violence. Because it would implicate themselves in terms of their desire to move to the whitest areas with the best school districts.

I don’t know that you would use this exact term, but you’ve also written about new forms of segregation, like  school districts in the south seceding from more integrated districts, which used county lines, under the guise of local control. Can you talk about the scale of these kinds of efforts and what sort of protections would have to exist to curb them?

It’s hard to quantify from what I’ve seen, particularly with the secessions. Around 2000 to 2014, there was a ramp up in efforts and then a scaling back as it got a little bit more attention. 

I do think that the scale is larger or at least increasing in the South as these particular school systems are released from desegregation orders. Even if they’re still under existing desegregation orders, the people charged with enforcing them aren’t paying attention. Suggested changes may go uncontested.

One of the things I wrote about was what was happening in Baton Rouge and St. George – just the other day St. George found a workaround. .

The next step will undoubtedly be to try and create their own school district.

So this is the other danger, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to quantify scale. Even when there are protections put in place to stop things like secessions, there’s immediately an attempted workaround. Whether it’s what they did in St. George or attempted to do in North Carolina, where they tried to create these charter school enclaves that were essentially charter districts that would have the same effect as a public school district secession.

What I’ve tried to do is identify where it is happening, because usually what you see is copycat attempts. I wouldn’t be surprised if what St. George did ultimately gets replicated in other places. Honestly, creating their own city is even worse than creating their own school district – that has even broader implications.

For tax revenues, policing, everything. The St. George example also gets at an idea you explore in your work, that high quality schools are scarce partially by design. In this current context, how do you see state legislatures taking desegregation up?

I like to remind people that states have plenary authority over public education. There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to, but often states lack the political will. We worry about campaigns, reelections, perceptions, all of those things. But in a perfect world where we could muster the political will, then there are a number of things that state legislatures could do.

The first I would suggest is rethinking the amount of authority given to school districts, particularly drawing school district boundary lines around municipal boundary lines. We take for granted that’s the way it has to be, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Many of us don’t live our lives confined to one municipality, particularly when you’re in a metropolitan area with many neighboring municipalities. For example, I live in Durham but I work in Chapel Hill, I often drive [outside] for my son’s sports. We don’t live just confined to Durham, but the way that schools tend to work is that we confine [entry] based on these arbitrary boundary lines that don’t make sense, to reinforce segregation and inequality.

States could decide, for example, that their primary way of distributing public education would be around regional boundary lines. They might take a group of municipalities and lump them together for the purposes of creating a school district unit. Those municipalities might share local revenues, they might assign children across municipal boundary lines, that sort of thing.

They could also read the right to education clauses in state constitutions differently to require more robust forms of funding, to suggest that any kind of secession, for example, would violate that right to education clause.

I’ve also heard this critique that it’s difficult to challenge these systems that are dependent on geography because of the limitations of the equal protection clause and the , which states the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining school assignment. Could you walk through the new legal framework you put forth in your work, and what might be required to get there?

The framework I set forth is to really challenge this connection between racialized geography and school assignment.

When you look at a seminal case like Milliken v. Bradley, where the Supreme Court said that you could not bring in the suburban school districts to help desegregate the Detroit public schools because those suburban school districts didn’t do anything wrong. 

Well, that’s just not true. As I note in the article, something like two thirds of the suburbs surrounding the Detroit public schools were sundown towns. They were quite complicit then in the segregated patterns that ended up happening with Detroit public schools.

The problem I’m suggesting is that from an equal protection perspective, there’s no doctrinal mechanism to unearth that kind of connection between race and geography that would create a racially segregated pattern.

I suggest borrowing from the Voting Rights Act, which has this sensitive test of factors that it uses to suss out whether or not boundary lines should exist or persist. And I suggest that we borrow some of that framework to look and see when we should abrogate boundary lines for purposes of an equal protection challenge.

Similarly, I suggest that that framework could also be useful to legislators in deciding whether or not they want to maintain certain boundary lines if they want to, as I alluded to earlier, use their plenary power to rethink and redraw district boundary lines in ways that would be more racially and economically inclusive.

I wonder if we could spend just a moment with charter schools because they do have some parts of their enrollment policies that people have pointed to as promising, like, as you know, requiring a lottery once they’re full or perhaps requiring some geographic quotas. Do you see charters more often being used as the example you shared before, to create exclusionary districts of their own?

It really depends. 

We have a large contingent of parents of color who are flocking to charter schools. It says something about what the feeling is around some of the deficiencies of public schools. That being said charters were never meant to supplant a system of public education. Where we go wrong, I think, is having charters be the primary [school option] rather than supplementing public schools.

Their original intention was to be places of innovation where you could have some relaxed regulations and you would reach a smaller cohort of students. Well, that’s being turned on its head so that charters … seek to be a primary vehicle of educating children.Some of the benefits of relaxed regulations, innovation, all of those things become detrimental when charter schools are the main thing in town, because charters can be places of exclusion. 

For example, a charter school can basically lawfully exclude poor children, children with disabilities, children of color by using race neutral mechanisms to do so. Some charter schools may say we’re not gonna offer free and reduced lunch. Well, that’s going to cut out a swath of children who would depend on free and reduced lunch. Other charters might say we’re not gonna offer transportation. Well, that’s gonna cut out a large swath of children who need transportation. 

A more sneaky way of doing it is that we have the specialized charter schools, let’s say, a Latin charter school, a Montessori, an Afrocentric charter school, some of the theme charter schools are going to attract a certain cohort of students.

And if you have a combination of a special charter school like that and they don’t offer free and reduced lunch and they don’t offer transportation, then what you’re going to get is a very specific kind of student who attends.

From that perspective, they can be exclusionary. 

If we think about public education as a gateway to cultivating citizens for democracy, the exclusionary aspects of charter schools are very bad, in ways that are even more dangerous than private schools because people tend to believe that because charters are quasi public that they’re doing the right thing. It’s just not always true. Some of these charter schools operate as exclusionary as private schools depending on some of the rules that are put in place. 

It’s great that charter schools do things like a lottery to ensure equity in terms of enrollment. Even those processes can be skewed in terms of information and symmetry to even sign up to be a part of the lottery. Some schools have requirements that you have to, for example, stand in line to put your kid’s name on the list. Parents have camped out in order to do that, and what kind of parents can do that?

The saddest part to me is that we are resulting to a lottery to distribute forms of public education. The kind of education you get shouldn’t be subject to the whims of a lottery.

Are there any efforts that you’ve seen successfully disrupt the significance of geography in school opportunity?

A while back in Nebraska, they made attempts at a regional school district. There was a voluntary component to it though, that didn’t make it ideal. I sadly can’t point to any area and say this is a model of how it should be done.

The one area I would say used to be a model is actually in Wake County, North Carolina. They have county based boundary lines, which means that all municipalities within the county are part of the school district. They used to have this really great socio-economic diversity school assignment plan that ultimately got shot down, because parents were upset and didn’t like it.

Would you say that’s usually where the efforts end? With failure of political will or the parent outrage, white parent outrage particularly?

Yeah, I think the parents are a huge driver of what ultimately ends up happening … there’s this idea that their child is being denied something … It’s a mix of parents and special interests that pump up certain kinds of parents and use them to advance ideas that are meant to decimate public education. I’ve seen those explode in recent years.

Anything on your mind that I haven’t asked you explicitly, or any areas you feel the media has ignored or misconstrued?

The question I get often is, given the reluctance of parents, particularly white parents, and the lack of political will, aren’t we better off just trying to abandon notions of integrating schools and just fixing schools so that they are great schools for all children? Even if they end up being racially and economically segregated schools?

I think that’s a fair question. But my response is that it’s important that we not abandon the project of trying to get racially and economically integrated schools.

Throughout our very brief history in the United States, we have not seen a successful model of racially and economically segregated schools that really advances everyone because of the way that race operates in America. Segregation by design is going to end up connoting forms of inferiority. It’s going to preclude necessary intergroup contact that we need to buttress a really flailing democracy.

The one time period in America where we can say that we actually try to have racially integrated schools, it worked. If you look at about 1968 to 1984, where we actually took seriously the legal mandate to integrate schools, what we saw happening is better cross-racial relationships. Reduction of the achievement gap score between Black and white. These are things that I think we lose sight of.

It might seem like there’s some pathway to just fix schools even if they end up being predominantly white or predominantly Black or Latino or nonwhite schools. It doesn’t work. A lot of focus goes on how it doesn’t work for students of color, but it really doesn’t work for white students either.

In the seminal Brown v. Board of Education, everyone’s heard of the doll test that the court relied on to suggest that segregated schools make black students feel inferior. What people don’t know is that the court was also presented with social science evidence regarding the harms of segregation for white students.

One of [the harms] that’s important at this moment is that white segregation creates feelings of superiority, but moral conflict as well. 

Having a group of inferior people – they struggle to reconcile that in ways that makes them more susceptible to authoritarianism and less likely to embrace democratic norms and ideals, which have the potential to disrupt their so-called superiority.

Almost everything that was in that social science research brief about the harms of white segregation is arguably coming to fruition today in terms of the way that democracy is unraveling.

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak during the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.

Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was “undoing the decline in residential segregation.”

“While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time,” Owens said.

Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public, though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the , which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis measures children’s exposure to peers of different racial backgrounds, comparing the average African American student’s proportion of white classmates with the average white student’s proportion of African American classmates in the same district. The difference between the two figures, measured on a 0–1 scale, is deemed the district’s “segregation level.” 

As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students. 

But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.

Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute “anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of this issue.”

“I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,” Kisida said. “But I don’t know if I would look at the trend from 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”

The charter factor

Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a “very solid finding” that dovetailed with his own prior work.

In 2019, he examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of data than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)

The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points — from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent — had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000. 

Another, smaller factor in pushing back integration, the authors argue, was the gradual eclipse of desegregation orders that began in the 1990s. As federal courts from injunctions requiring them to evenly balance racial groups across schools, campuses became about 1 percentage point more segregated than they otherwise would have been. 

Boston College professor Shep Melnick, who published last year on the halting efforts toward desegregation that began in 1954 with Brown, said that the lifting of injunctions accelerated during the early 2000s, eventually releasing more than half of the districts that had previously been under court oversight. In some instances, though, local enforcement — or even awareness — of the orders was so paltry that their sunsetting would not have made much difference.

“Some of these schools that were formerly under court order didn’t even realize they were under court order,” said Melnick. “So the effects of the orders in those cases probably were not that great.” 

Melnick and Owens agreed that the public needed to be conscious of the differing definitions of racial segregation that underlie research studies. For example, multiple waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America have made the U.S. population significantly more diverse than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Efforts to quantify desegregation simply as the exposure of African American students to white classmates must account for the fact that white students represent a much smaller share of the total student body.

“When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,” Owens concluded. “But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids — because there are fewer white kids around.”

A brief overview of the project, now live at : In the American judicial system, the two small words “et al.,” meaning “and others,” erase the names, faces and histories of everyday individuals seeking remedies for wrongs done to them. Used as a reference in class-action litigation in place of the names of each individual plaintiff, those four letters relegate men, women and children to what can be characterized as a “legal wasteland,” rendering them and their stories unknown.

In the instance of Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, those four letters diminished the stories of families who risked much to participate in five essential class-action lawsuits across the nation. Those five suits — Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart and Bolling v. Sharpe — were later consolidated by the United States Supreme Court.

While the name Oliver Brown is universally known, the names and stories of these other revolutionaries have remained largely untold, buried under the weight of four little letters.

But now a wide swath of Brown v. Board plaintiffs and their relatives assembled by Cheryl Brown Henderson, founding president of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research and daughter of Oliver Brown, are hoping to change that — by detailing their stories of oppression, their battle for justice and their triumph. Five years ago we helped with the launch of Henderson’s book , and today we’re thrilled to be relaunching our digital companion diving into that slice of history, both addressing the histories of the individual cases and streaming video oral histories with family members connected to the original litigation. See the full archive at . 

Also worth checking out today: A notable excerpt from the book about this broader effort to widen our understanding of history. From South Carolina to Virginia, from the District of Columbia to Delaware, Brown Henderson writes about the stories and the characters behind the five pivotal Brown lawsuits that were appealed, introducing the families who were willing to stand up for what was right and the courtroom machinations that eventually took Brown v. Board, et al. to the high court. Learn more about all the cases right here.

Three other key things to see and share on today’s Brown v. Board site: 

1. Testimonials From Those Who Lived the History

In Recovering Untold Stories, Brown Henderson turns the focus on lesser-known families who were part of the consolidated Brown v. Board case and spotlights the reflections of descendants about why their families stood up, the consequences they faced and the enduring legacy of that decision. See our full archive of testimonials — including this item from J.A. Stokes (above), who led a student strike in Virginia with his twin sister. From his reflection: “Our first meeting took place on the hard cinderblock bleachers that served as part of our athletic field. The four of us — Barbara Johns, Carrie Stokes, Irene Taylor and I — were the founding members. With this meeting, we launched one of most influential civil rights movements in the state of Virginia. In my view, we jump-started our own Manhattan Project.” See all our testimonials. 

2. Watch the Oral Histories

In addition to the above book excerpts, we’ve also relaunched a number of in-depth video interviews with key family members and outside experts reflecting on the five cases that became Brown v. Board. See all the video highlights here — including Deborah Dandridge (above), who was a grade-schooler in Topeka, Kansas, when the verdict was announced. In this 2019 video, she reflects on the landmark ruling and the activism that got five cases consolidated in front of the Supreme Court, noting “it’s the youth that will make progress in our democracy.” Watch all the oral histories. 

3. Download the Book For Free

In addition to our case summaries, testimonials and videos, you can also : Recovering Untold Stories — An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision. Just click “.”