Civil Rights. School Segregation. State Tuition Payments to Students Attending Segregated Schools Are Unconstitutional Only if the Payments Are the Predominant Support of the School. Griffin v. State Bd. of Educ., 239 F. Supp. 560 (E. D. Va. 1965)

1966 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 841 ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1197-1226
Author(s):  
Michael R. Glass

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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.


2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (12) ◽  
pp. 1-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Palardy ◽  
Russell Rumberger ◽  
Truman Butler

Background/Context The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education concluded that segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore unlawful. That decision was not based solely upon the notion that segregated black schools were inferior in terms of academic instruction, curricular rigor, resources, etc., but also on research that showed segregating black children had negative social-emotional and behavioral consequences. However, the vast majority of the research on school segregation over the past 50 years, has focused on its effects on academic achievement and opportunity to learn. As a result, little is known about the effects of school segregation on social-emotional and behavioral outcomes. This is a critical gap in the literature because other research indicates that school behaviors are as strong or stronger predictors of long-term educational, social, and employment outcomes as academic achievement. Objectives The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of three forms of school segregation—socioeconomic, ethnic/racial, and linguistic—on school behaviors (i.e., attendance, grade retention, and suspension) and academic performance (reading and math achievement test scores and GPA) in high school. The study also examines the degree to which each of three school mechanisms (school inputs, peer influences, and school practices) mediates the effects of segregation on student outcomes. Research Design The study uses survey data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:02). A sequence of multilevel models are fit to the data to address the research objectives. Conclusions American high schools are highly segregated by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and English language status. Racial/ethnic and socioeconomic segregation are strongly associated with school behaviors and academic performance. The negative effects of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic segregation on school behaviors and academic performance inordinately effect black, Hispanic, and low SES adolescents because they are far more likely to attend segregated schools. School practices that reduce disorder and disruption and emphasize academics strongly mediate of the effects of segregation as does having friends at school with an academic focus. Adopting positive behavioral practices to reduce behaviors that interfere with learning without increasing suspension and expulsion are likely most critical for ameliorating the effects of segregation. Reducing academic tracking is also recommended, given that it likely contributes to negative within-school peer influences among low SES and minority adolescents. However, greater integration is likely necessary to fully address the consequences of segregation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421987763
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.


2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McGrath Morris

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.


Author(s):  
Roger J.R. Levesque

The law does not square with people’s experiences of segregation and diversity. An empirical look at the legal system’s effectiveness in addressing school segregation reveals, from a practical perspective, that segregation persists and even surpasses levels before the civil rights movement. Yet, the legal system continues as though segregation is a thing of the past. Even more bizarre, the negative effects of racial and ethnic disparities in schooling are well documented, and the legal system compels itself to ignore much of them. To exacerbate matters, legal analysts increasingly interpret the law as a system that operates in a different world than the one documented by researchers who describe disparities and what could be done about them. For their part, researchers pervasively continue to document experiences without considering the legal system’s basic concerns. This book details the source of these gaps, evaluates their empirical and legal foundation, explains why they persist, and reveals what can be done about them.


Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Charles M. Lamb

This chapter surveys the literature on racial discrimination and segregation in education and housing in the United States. It indicates that federal governmental institutions ultimately led the way in outlawing school segregation and some of the practices that created or maintained racially separate neighborhoods. Yet research also shows that much more progress has been made at enforcing federal legal standards during particular periods of time than others, as the political system has vacillated between the need to ensure equal opportunity and the desire to maintain aspects of past segregation. Recent studies demonstrate that school and housing segregation have declined, depending on the school district or housing market being examined. However, because segregated schools and housing patterns are still widespread in much of the country, both subjects continue to be fruitful areas for research.


Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder

Chapter 2 identifies a distinct uptick in northern Black support for separate schools. The rise of scientific racism fueled anti-Black discrimination that accelerated alongside the first Great Migration and the Great Depression. Hostile whites segregated classrooms and buildings in defiance of state law as Black populations increased. At the same time, there is compelling evidence from New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan that Black families either passively accepted or actively requested separate classrooms and schools in order to access Black teachers. Many Black northerners believed separate schools would offer a higher quality education and more of the teaching and administrative jobs that sustained the Black middle class. Still, this position was far from universal, and many northern Black communities energetically resisted school segregation. A growing number of Black intellectuals and civil rights activists vehemently objected to any form of state-sponsored segregation and campaigned actively for school integration.


Author(s):  
Charles W. Eagles

Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state’s past. In 1974, when Random House’s Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit (Loewen v. Turnipseed) challenging the book ban.


2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Dougherty

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers: •How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?•How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?•How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?•Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?


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