Re-segregation Looms as 'Brown' Decision Abandoned
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 2/2/2004
Despite advances in desegregating education in the United States, segregation levels today have reverted to those of 1969, according to a new report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Released just one day before what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 75th birthday, "Brown at 50: King's Dream or Plessy's Nightmare," attests that recent efforts by the U.S. Supreme Court to dismantle effective desegregation programs have recreated the "dual society."Fifty years after the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the ethnic composition of the nation's school system has changed dramatically. Overall, American public schools are 60 percent white, while in the western United States white students constitute a minority of those enrolled.
Latino students in the West, who did not represent a significant portion of the population when Brown was decided, have felt the greatest effects of re-segregation -- by race, income level, and language within schools, according to the report. The most desegregated states for Latinos are in the Northwest.
"If the words and the reality of King's dream could come to life again on Capitol Hill, there is much that could be done," authors Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee stated in the report.
The study also shows a substantial trend toward re-segregation in many of the states that were mostly desegregated in 1991. Segregation is most severe in urban cities within large metropolitan areas, smaller central cities, and suburbs of large cities.
Asian students are most likely to attend multiracial schools and schools with the smallest concentration of their own racial group, the report concludes. For African Americans, the most integrated state in 2001 was Kentucky. However, in some states with very low black populations, school segregation is soaring as desegregation efforts are abandoned.
Among the four districts included in the original Brown decision, the effectiveness of educational desegregation varies, but three of the four counties show considerable success in achieving desegregated education.
"In many districts where court-ordered desegregation was ended in the past decade, there has been a major increase in segregation," the report states. "The courts assumed that the forces that produced segregation and inequality had been cured. This report shows they have not been."
Despite the apparent success of desegregation efforts, High Court decisions, such as Milliken v. Bradley, which relates to Detroit, Mich., have authorized policies toward re-segregation. During the period when courts and executive agencies actively enforced desegregation, black enrollment in majority white schools increased 14 fold in six years. As the courts began to limit integration programs under President Ronald Regan, the rate of black students in majority white schools fell to about 30 percent, less than the 1970 levels.
The report's authors say that re-segregation is worrisome because segregated minority schools face conditions of concentrated poverty, which is directly related to unequal educational opportunity. These conditions are not as likely in majority white segregated schools. According to the study, students at these schools are more likely to be from single parent homes, to have low achieving peers, to take less demanding courses, and to be taught by less qualified teachers.
Despite the considerable obstacles presented in the report, Orfield and Lee still believe that King's understanding of the Brown decision as a "joyous daybreak to end the long night of enforced segregation," is attainable. They suggest that understanding the benefits of integration for minorities, as well as white students, would be a step toward realizing the promise of Brown.
