From Sword to Shield to Myth: Facing the Facts of De Facto School Segregation

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1197-1226
Author(s):  
Michael R. Glass
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Legal Recognition ◽  
School Officials ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Brown Decision

During the legal battles that followed the 1954 Brown decision, the de jure-de facto binary became the key legal distinction used to define the limits of school desegregation. In recent years, historians have labeled de facto segregation as an evasive and misleading “myth.” However, the concept had a long political career before it became a subterfuge. In fact, civil rights activists first invented the concept in an attempt to force legal recognition of segregated schools outside of the South. But in an ironic turn of events, school officials, judges, lawmakers, journalists, and ordinary citizens later appropriated the phrase to deny responsibility for the color line. Thus, what began as an allegation of racial discrimination ultimately became an impenetrable defense of legal innocence. This article recovers the decade of fierce public debates surrounding northern school desegregation by tracing the evolution of de facto segregation from allegation to defense to myth.

What Brown Awakened

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Student Performance ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
English Language ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
School Officials ◽  
Economic Class ◽  
Racial Differentials ◽  
Brown Decision

Brown v. Board of Education established equality as a central commitment of American schools but launched more than a half century of debate over whether students from different racial, religious, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and other lines of difference must be taught in the same classrooms. Brown explicitly rejected state-ordered racial segregation, yet neither law nor practice has produced a norm of racially integrated classrooms. Courts restrict modest voluntary efforts to achieve racially mixed schools. Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort. Talk of this disappointing development dominated the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Instead of looking at the composition of schools and classrooms, policy-makers measure racial equality in American schooling by efforts to reduce racial differentials in student performance on achievement tests, and those efforts have yielded minimal success. Historians question whether the lawyers litigating Brown undermined social changes already in the works or so narrowed reforms to the focus on schools that they turned away from the pursuit of economic justice. Commentators have even questioned whether the Court’s decision itself ever produced real civil rights reform. Although Brown focused on racial equality, it also inspired social movements to pursue equal schooling beyond racial differences, and it yielded successful legal and policy changes addressing the treatment of students’ language, gender, disability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation. These developments are themselves still news, inadequately acknowledged and appreciated as another key legacy of Brown. Yet here, too, judges, legislators, school officials, experts, and parents disagree over whether and when equality calls for teaching together, in the same classrooms, students who are or who are perceived to be different from one another. Parents and educators have at times pushed for separate instruction and at times for instructing different students side by side. As the twenty-first century proceeds, equality in law and policy in the United States increasingly calls for mixing English-language learners with English-speaking students and disabled with non-disabled students, but students’ residential segregation and school assignments often produce schools and classrooms divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.

A Chink in the Armor: The Black-Led Struggle for School Desegregation in Arlington, Virginia, and the End of Massive Resistance

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McGrath Morris
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Student ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
White School

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

Desegregating the South, 1955-1970

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Harvie Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
School Officials ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Brown Decision

Southern school desegregation after Brown progressed through four successive stages. The first might be termed absolute defiance, lasting from 1955 until the collapse of Virginia’s massive resistance in 1959. The second was token compliance, stretching from 1959 until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With that act, a third phase of modest integration began with the efforts of southern school officials to avoid fund cutoffs by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The 1968 Supreme Court decision of Green v. County School Board commenced a fourth phase of massive integration during which the South became the most integrated section of the country. Yet even as the fourth phase developed, a fifth—that of resegregation— was emerging in some southern localities. Breaks in history, of course, are never so neat as their chroniclers might wish. During the defiant stage, for example, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida practiced token compliance. And during much of the token compliance stage, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina practiced total defiance. The different phases thus express only regional momentum as a whole and not the progress, or lack thereof, of a particular state. Even as a gauge of regional momentum, moreover, these phases are imperfect, given wide differences in temperament between the Deep and Upper South. These differences, particularly at first, were important. “In terms of immediate progress toward desegregation in the South,” noted Numan Bartley, “there was precious little to choose between the complex machinations of upper South states and the bellicose interposition of Virginia and the Deep South. But in terms of the future of the Brown decision, the difference was considerable. States of the upper South, with the exception of Virginia, accepted the validity of the Supreme Court decree and aimed to evade its consequences; Deep South states refused to accede any legitimacy to the decision.” Prior to the Kennedy presidency, this division “helped to keep alive the principle of Brown v. Board of Education in the South.” From 1955 to 1968 the Supreme Court remained largely inactive in school desegregation.

American Federalism and the Civil Rights Act of 1875

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
S. G. F. Spackman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Legislative History ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Publicly Supported ◽  
American Federalism

Charles Sumner's Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, which after a tortuous legislative history became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was intended to spell out in specific terms the procedural guarantees of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and so to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodation, entertainment and transport, in juries, churches and publicly supported schools and charities. The measure was not only the culmination of Sumner's life-long efforts on behalf of the Blacks, but also the only comprehensive attempt made by Congress during Reconstruction to secure racial equality. Yet the purpose of the Act was undermined even before its passage by die racial ambivalence and political calculations of its supporters, while the challenge it made to traditional concepts of American federalism was defeated in 1883 by the Supreme Court's decision that it was unconstitutional. The nature and extent of this challenge, however, becomes apparent only in the context of the pressures that shaped Republican legislation.

Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation: written by Duncan Tonatiuh

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sturm
Keyword(s):  
Negative Impact ◽  
Lesson Plan ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Position Statement ◽  
Venn Diagram ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Segregated Schooling ◽  
Compare And Contrast

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation, by Duncan Tonatiuh, along with other materials on school segregation to address the question, is separate ever equal? Design/methodology/approach Students compare and contrast segregated schooling using a Venn diagram, then research other instances of school segregation, paying attention to the time periods, geographic locations, and impact on segregated individuals. In pairs, students identify these locations on a US map and create a class timeline of the instances of segregation they uncover. Using their research, the class then discusses segregation and its impact on the segregated groups and individuals. Afterwards, students compare their school to the schools researched to determine if segregation exists in their school, and form a class position statement on the importance and benefits of school desegregation. Findings Students will build an understanding of the importance and benefits of school desegregation and the negative impact of segregation. Originality/value This lesson plan brings together multiple texts that illustrate the impact of segregation on various cultures in America.

scholarly journals Lawyers With Disabilities: L’Handicape C’est Nous

2008 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
Physically Handicapped ◽  
Rights Issue

For having helped to make disability a twentieth-century civil rights issue in the United States, our profession deserves much credit. Lawyers have written, codified, and enforced several progressive initiatives. Inspired by the struggle for racial justice through law that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the disability rights movement was itself a civil rights inspiration even before the Brown decision, earning important early legislative advances for rehabilitation, vocational training, and integration of disabled persons in public life. The first national organization to focus on disability as such rather than one particular condition, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped, took an early interest in fostering legal change and lobbied for employment-discrimination laws and new statutes to advance the interests of disabled Americans. The Rehabilitation Act of 19733 made federal law out of the radical yet sensible idea that societies construct disability at least as much as they reflect it and that prejudices and stereotypes, which are as potent as purely medical or anatomical facts, impede persons with disabilities.

Behind the atomic curtain: School desegregation and territoriality in the early Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
James T. Sparrow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Security ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Red Flags ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations

The early Cold War was, infamously, a time of political retrenchment, when anticommunists exploited popular fears and national security pretexts to squelch the democratic energies of the Popular Front. Left-led unions and civil rights organizations alike purged their leadership of any communist affiliation, while professional anticommunists pushed other organizations on the Left to do the same or land on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Support for left-liberal causes such as anti-fascism, labor rights, gender equity, and racial equality' provided red flags for investigators and agitators on the prowl for evidence of internal subversion.1

The Judicialization of American Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Blokhuis ◽  
Randall Curren
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Due Process ◽  
School Funding ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Education ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
School Officials

Judicialization is the term most commonly used to describe the supervening authority of the courts in virtually every sphere of public life in liberal democratic states. In the United States, where judicialization is most advanced, political and administrative decisions by agencies and officials at every level of government are subject to constitutional scrutiny, and thus to the oversight and substituted decision-making authority of unelected members of the federal judiciary. The judicialization of American education is associated with the judicial review of administrative decisions by public school officials in lawsuits filed in the federal courts by or on behalf of students alleging due process and other Constitutional rights violations. So defined, the judicialization of American education has been facilitated by a number of legal and social developments in the Civil Rights Era, including the ascription of limited Constitutional rights to minors in public schools, the expansion of government agency liability, and the ensuing proliferation of lawsuits under Section 1983. Judicialization has been criticized for subjecting routine administrative decisions to complex and costly procedural regimentation, for distorting social relations by subjecting them to legal oversight, and for flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits. The causes and outcomes of the judicialization of American education present a complex and mixed picture, however. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity’s Legal Services Program has played a central role in judicialization by providing legal resources to confront racial injustice in the punishment of students and in school funding.

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