Moving Backward

Fifty years on, what is the real legacy of Brown v. Board of Education?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A month ahead of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, historians, educators, politicians, and the press are appraising the legacy of Brown and the fortunes of minority students in public schools today. What they’ve found is that the achievements of Brown, which declared that the doctrine of “separate, but equal” didn’t pass constitutional muster, and mandated the racial integration of public school system, have been steadily reversed through a combination of court rulings and general inattention. Public schools are actually more segregated today than in the 1970s.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, on May 17, 1954, was a landmark, putting an end to government-sanctioned segregation. And it has brought some enduring gains; the high school graduation rate for black students, for example, are up nearly 30 percent since 1967.

But in the last 20 or 30 years, “white flight” from cities and urban areas in the 1970s has undermined the push toward desegregation. The Supreme Court has ruled against Brown in the intervening years. One particular case, Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974, which declared that the Detroit suburbs did not have to participate in desegregation plans even though white flight was clearly resegregating the schools in a regional manner. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned at the time that Milliken was “a giant step backwards.”

In recent years, the goal of racial integration enshrined in Brown has slipped down the list of priorities for educational reform. Angelo Ancheta, the legal director for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, writes in USA Today:

“Instead of being a national priority, desegregation has taken a back seat to high-stakes testing, school choice and vouchers, even though there’s little to show that minority students are learning more under the new policies. Many of today’s schools are as racially segregated as the schools of earlier decades, and districts that have abandoned court-monitored plans are quickly resegregating. At the same time, voluntary desegregation plans are being attacked as unconstitutional, achievement gaps are widening, and increasing numbers of Asian-American and Latino students – among the most segregated students in the country – have made the picture even more complex.”

Segregation in the school system is a fact. In 2000, 71 percent of minority students attended schools where they were in the majority. Minorities accounted for nearly 4 in 10 public school students. Nationally, 88 percent of schools that are less than 10 percent white are high-poverty schools. According to the Civil Rights Project, integration is now at a lower level than in the mid-1970s when busing programs were in full effect.

Poignantly, the average black or Hispanic graduates high school with skills on par with those of white eighth-graders. According to a report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard and the Urban Institute, a liberal think tank, while 75 percent of white students graduated from high school in 2001, only 50 percent of all black students, 51 percent of Native American students, and 53 percent of all Hispanic students got a high school diploma in the same year.

Would a greater commitment to desegregation help even things out? Studies suggest just that. There tends to be a difference in quality between schools dominated by minorities and those with mostly white students. As Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe writes, “if a quality school exists, white families will storm the doors down to hoard the spots.” An Op-Ed in USA Today explains why school quality is such an impediment to desegregation:

“Parents in suburban schools accustomed to strong teachers have a hard time imagining the low quality of teaching in poor districts. In schools serving affluent families, 70 percent of the students have teachers who majored in the subject they instruct and hold a teaching license in the topic. In schools where most kids are poor, that holds true for only half the students. Drawing on multiple studies, the non-profit Education Trust calculates that if students were assigned highly rated teachers for five years, test-score gaps separating poor and middle-class students would disappear.”

Studies show that all students benefit from attending racially diverse schools, and students who are deprived of the learning experiences that come with integration will be less prepared to enter an increasingly diverse workforce and society.

President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, plays a mixed role in the problem. It attempts to close the gap by requiring top teachers in all core classes, higher annual achievement by students in all major groups, and other improvements. But critics argue that the law amounts to an unfunded mandate.

The Civil Rights/Urban report claims that NCLB also lets “schools, districts, and states [can] all but eliminate graduation rate accountability for minority subgroups.”

In a recent poll taken by the Associated Press, most Americans say that school integration has improved education for black students and that they prefer schools with an ethnic and racial mix.

Still, four in five Americans oppose sending students out of their community to achieve racial balance.

So, while most people agree that integration is the ideal situation, not many—and certainly not many well-off whites who can send their kids to the school of their choice as is—are willing to change.

Debra Dickerson reviewed two books on Brown by two of the nation’s premier civil-rights scholars and attorneys for the May/June issue of Mother Jones. Both conclude that perhaps “separate, but equal” is the answer for schools, so long as it means minority students are getting a good education.

Writes Dickerson:

“The notion of retreating from integration is blasphemous, unthinkable, inherently racist. Yet, it rings true, even as one sputters in protest at the heresy. Fifty years of culture wars notwithstanding, integration is still more rhetoric than reality, and it is the ever-neglected minority children who pay the price for our continued focus on this seemingly unattainable goal. Perhaps it’s time America cried “Uncle.” Racism won.

While Plessy-style segregation might have been psychologically harmful, even more so has been the fruitless, enervating quest to force, trick, or cajole whites into sharing their neighborhoods and classrooms.

Regardless, 50 years is a long enough experiment, and it’s time we accepted the obvious, as did W.E.B. DuBois in 1935: “Negro children needed neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is education.” Insane as it seems, perhaps embracing segregation—ensuring that separate truly is equal—will make all the difference.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate