De Facto Segregation and the Digital Divide

While de jure segregation is illegal in the United States, many school systems still enforce a form of de facto segregation, based on various factors including socio-economic status. This causes disparity in educational outcomes, especially when examined through the lens of skills identified by the partnership for 21st century learning (i.e., critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity). A digital divide, which has been created by unequal access to technology, is directly responsible for an uneven playing field for disadvantaged students, and the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated existing inequalities. Suggestions regarding how to reduce the digital divide are shared; implementing these might create a more equitable learning environment for all students.

The Muddled Distinction Between De Jure and De Facto Segregation

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 declared unconstitutional voluntary, race-based plans to integrate public schools in Jefferson County, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington. The decisionrested on a critical distinction in constitutional law between “de jure” segregation—resulting from purposeful discrimination by the government—and “de facto” racial imbalance derived from unintentional or “fortuitous” actions by state and private entities. The Court held that de facto school districts could not voluntarily assign students to schools according to their race for purposes of promoting integration. In a vigorous dissent, Justice Breyer argued the “futility” of the de jure–de facto distinction, contending that both districts should have been afforded the constitutional flexibility to pursue voluntary remedies that address racial imbalance in their schools. This chapter takes up Justice Breyer’s dissent to explore the complicated origins of school segregation outside the South and the federal cases that adjudicated its constitutionality. Its central contribution is to recover the often confusing legal narratives about segregation in the period after Brown and how federal courts struggled to discern the constitutional boundaries between de jure and de facto discrimination. The chapter briefly describes the constitutional turns that facilitated the Court’s decision in Parents Involved, including the advent of the intent requirement in equal protection and “colorblindness” doctrine, which treats any use of race as presumptively unconstitutional, regardless of its integrative purpose.

The Integration of Schools in Lee County, Florida

Fort Myers, Florida, is one of the fastest growing parts of the United States yet historians have paid little attention to the area. This is especially true of the historiography surrounding Dunbar-Heights, the historically Black sections of the city. Despite having one of the largest Black communities between Tampa and Miami, there is scant information on how de jure segregation operated and ended in Southwest Florida. The research provided here fills this historiographical gap using oral histories that give us a glimpse into Florida’s not so distant past. This methodology enables the Dunbar Community to tell a new Black history of Fort Myers. Collectively the speakers presented in this piece help explain how Jim Crow influenced the integration of schools into the 1970s. This history of Fort Myers reminds Floridians of how connected SWFL was with the rest of the state and how deeply intertwined Florida was with the American South.

Branch School Buildings in the St. Louis Public Schools District: Tools to Support the Segregative Neighborhood School Policy of the St. Louis Board of Education

During and after World War II, large numbers of African Americans from the former Confederate States migrated to St. Louis, Missouri. The pace of this migration placed a strain on the St. Louis Public Schools district. The district responded to the facilities shortage by constructing small branch school buildings in its compliance with de jure segregation laws in Missouri before 1954, and after 1954, in its efforts to covertly maintain a pseudo-integrated public school district’s neighborhood school policy.

Herbert Hill

This chapter presents a portrait of Herbert Hill, who identified himself as “an unreconstructed abolitionist.” As labor secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was a combatant in a war against men and women who, by history, politics, and religion, should have been in his camp. Hill was a brilliant and determined crusader who made the most of the limited legal remedies available against workplace discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s. He brought actions before the National Labor Relations Board to decertify unions that violated the nondiscrimination provision in federal contracts, and he carried cases against both labor unions and employers to state antidiscrimination commissions. Hill consciously fashioned this employment rights campaign after the larger NAACP fight to dismantle de jure segregation and discrimination in education, housing, and at the ballot box. He drafted an effective and widely distributed NAACP Labor Manual that described the complex gamut of discrimination tactics in the workplace and advised African Americans that the NAACP was ready to aid them in their fight against such inequities.

Legally White, Socially “Mexican”: The Politics of De Jure and De Facto School Segregation in the American Southwest

The history of Mexican American school segregation is complex, often misunderstood, and currently unresolved. The literature suggests that Mexican Americans experienced de facto segregation because it was local custom and never sanctioned at the state level in the American Southwest. However, the same literature suggests that Mexican Americans experienced de jure segregation because school officials implemented various policies that had the intended effect of segregating Mexican Americans. Rubén Donato and Jarrod S. Hanson argue in this article that although Mexican Americans were legally categorized as “White,” the American public did not recognize the category and treated Mexican Americans as socially “colored” in their schools and communities. Second, although there were no state statutes that sanctioned the segregation of Mexican Americans, it was a widespread trend in the American Southwest. Finally, policies and practices historically implemented by school officials and boards of education should retroactively be considered de jure segregation.

Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875–1905

This article reexamines the well-known debate over the origins of de jure segregation in the American South, which began in 1955 with the publication of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Arguing that the debate over Woodward's thesis implicates familar but outmoded ways of looking at sociolegal change and Southern society, the article proposes a reorientation of this debate using theoretical perspectives taken from recent work by legal historians, critical race theorists, and historians of race, class, and gender. This article examines the advent of railroad segregation in Tennessee (the state that enacted the nation's first railroad segregation statute) in order to sketch out these themes, arguing that de jure segregation was brought about by a dialectic between legal, social, and identity-based phenomena. This dialectic did not die out with the coming of de jure segregation; rather it continued into the modern era.