Rick Dean
Registered
16
http://www.detnews.com/2004/schools/0401/0...9/a01-31395.htm
Good News: 50 years later, school segregation persists
Makeup of U.S. classrooms shows cures elusive as anniversary of historic court decision nears
By Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling that remains a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.
And yet the case, Brown v. Board of Edu
ation, ultimately failed to accomplish its main goal: desegregate schools.
As America prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark legal decision, segregation persists — even thrives

12; in classrooms across the country, according to sociologists and civil rights advocates.
Some of the worst racial isolation exists in Detroit and Michigan, they said.
“It’s going backwards,” said Gary Orfiel
d, a Harvard education professor who co-directs the school’s Civil Rights Project.
“The schools are profoundly unequal and no one has any plans” to fix them.
On Monday, the University of Michigan will kick off a semester-long commemoration of the legal ruling by hosting a lecture by two daughters of the lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown.
A study by the Civil Rights Project last year found that, even as the nation’s population has grown more diverse, white schools have gotten whiter and black schools more black.
T
he Harvard report showed that 70 percent of blacks attend schools with mostly minority students. The last time students were this racially isolated was in 1968, it said.
By overturning a separat
e-but-equ
al legal doctrine that had existed since the late 1800s, the Brown decision removed segregation from the law books. But it never struck it from people’s hearts, sociologists said.
The difference between the 1950s and today is that the current ver
sion of segregation came about by choice. Which leaves civil rights leaders wondering: Is this progress?
With their dream deferred, they focus instead on ensuring that black schools are treated the same as those frequented by whites. Separate but equal may be their best hope.
Mind-set overturned
In the early 1950s, it wasn’t just schools that were legally segregated in the South. It was restaurants, buses, water fountains.
Racial separation was a deeply ingrained way of life.
Into this emotio
nal morass, laden with messy overtures of slavery and racism, stepped the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was 347 U.S. 483, titled Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas. <
br>
With unl
awyerly simplicity, the court dispatched the separate-but-equal principle, finding that it interfered with the education of blacks by making them feel inferior.
“We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no
place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the court stated.
While the ruling eventually stumbled in bringing lasting desegregation, it helped change the course of American history by boosting the fledgling civil rights movement, historians said.
It provided the legal basis that was used to loosen the underpinnings of segregation laws beyond the schoolroom. With Jim Crow in retreat, blacks eventually won a measure of equality in jobs and housing.
Girl becomes symbol
Movements need symbols, and in the Brown case it was the 8-year-old daughter of the lead plaintiff.
Linda Brown played with white children in the street and had them over for
dinner and sleep-ove
rs. But she wasn’t allowed to go to school with them.
“I didn’t realize skin color was keeping the two groups separate,” said Linda Brown Thompson, who is now an educational consultant.
Every morning, she woke up several hours earlier than her white friends and trudge
d past homeless men in a railroad switching yard on her way to catch a bus, which took her two miles to a black school.
Sometimes it rained and sometimes it snowed as she waited for the bus, she said. Sometimes it was so cold she returned home in tears.
The walk to the bus was seven blocks. A white school was four blocks from her front steps.
Brown wondered why she couldn’t go to school with her friends, but there’s only so much a parent could explain to a th
ird-grader.
Her mother simply told her: “You’re as good and special as anyone.”
Fight wasn’t over
When the NAACP won Brown v. Board in
1954, some members of the
civil rights organization thought the fight over desegregated schools was over.
Instead, it marked the beginning of a half-century of battles and lost causes: busing, theme schools, court-ordered oversight, billions of dollars in spending.
In the South, gains in integration have been reversed and, in many parts of the No
rth, it has never been addressed in a meaningful way, educators said.
“While we have come a long way since the 1954 decision, we still have many many miles to travel,” said Lester Monts, University of Michigan senior vice provost for academic affairs. “We are not there yet, even after 50 years.”
It didn’t take long for problems to begin with the Brown decision. In a follow-up case a year later, dubbed Brown II, the Sup
reme Court ruled that the schools should be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.”
Opponents used the vagueness of the phrase to do nothing for the next decade, his
torians said. By 1964, 98 perce
nt of the blacks in the South continued to attend schools that were all black.
It was only after rulings in several other court cases that schools began to integrate in the mid-1960s. The trend continued through the next two decades, but then began to reverse itself.
“The segregation was institutionalized,” said Linda Ti
llman, an associate professor at Wayne State University who has studied race and education. “It never went away completely.”
Half of cases dismissed
Desegregation stopped where it started: in the Supreme Court.
By the beginning of the 1990s, a now conservative high court looked askance at the court-appointed desegregation plans across the South and some parts of the North, Tillman said. By the end of the de
cade, nearly 50 desegregation cases had been dismissed.
Free from judicial oversight, many school districts moved back toward racial isolation. The South had gone from desegre
gation to resegregation.
Desp
ite a decade of resegregation in the South, its schools remain more integrated today than those in the North, researchers said.
That’s because integration never came to many Northern classrooms. And the reason for that lies with a legal case focused on Detroit.
In 1971, a federal judge approved a plan to bus Detroit students to the suburbs and suburb
an students to the city. Most of the city students were black while those in the suburbs were white.
The judge, Stephen Roth, was trying to remedy what he had found to be intentional segregation in the Detroit school system.
But the Supreme Court nullified his action in 1974. The high court said the suburbs couldn’t be included in the busing plan unless they caused the segregation.
The ruling ma
rked a shift in thinking by the Supreme Court and was the first serious legal setback for desegregation supporters in the 20 years since the Brown decision, said William L. Taylor
, a longtime civil rights attorney based in
Washington.
More importantly, it stopped other large, metro areas in the North from adopting cross-busing plans with their suburbs.
“The timing was terrible,” Taylor said. “The Supreme Court had never addressed the question in the North. They had no rules to deal with.”
Geography plays a role
The North practiced a type of segregati
on that was more subtle than the Southern version and, therefore, tougher to confront, scholars said.
While schools in the South were segregated by law, those in the North were racially separated by geography. The school segregation mirrored the residential segregation. As inner cities got more black and suburbs more white, their schools did the same.
It was one thing to strike down
an antiquated Southern law. It was quite another to tell Northerners where they could live.
The North underwent a vicious cycle as residential segregation led to school
segregation, which led to more residential isol
ation as more whites fled what they perceived as poor city schools.
In 1954, 84 percent of the students in Detroit public schools were white, according to school statistics. Today, it’s 3.7 percent.
Two types of schools
And so it comes down to this: A half century after the Brown decision, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 38 years after the beginning of busing, A
merica has two types of schools: those the poor are forced to attend and those selected by the middle class, which exercises its choice by having the financial freedom to decide where to live.
Supporters of desegregation say their goal isn’t for blacks to go to a white school, but rather to attend a middle-class one.
Segregation by race is closely related
to segregation by income, and poverty heavily influences learning, they said. The poor schools are burdened with low test scores, weak curriculums, less qualified teachers
and students less likely to go to college.
&#
8220;I don’t think it was about black and white schools,” said Bill Brooks, chairman of the Detroit Public Schools reform board. “We need to make sure funds are allocated to all school districts.”
School segregation is especially severe in Detroit and Michigan.
A Detroit News analysis in 2002 found that most students in Metro Detroit attend schools where they are the same race as 90 perce
nt of their classmates.
With little public outcry for desegregation, supporters, unsure how to revive the issue, may be entering the twilight of their campaign.
Race can be considered
But, in June, a tiny flame was lit in the gathering darkness. And it happened, of all places, in Michigan.
In a case involving the University
of Michigan, the Supreme Court ruled that the educational benefits of diversity made it permissible to consider race as one of several factors in evaluating an applica
nt.
“It’s a big turning point,” sa
id U-M spokesman Joe Serwach. “It was considered by some as a once-in-a-generation case.”
Among those celebrating is the university itself, which views the ruling as kin and kind to one in Brown v. Board of Education.
Some hope the school’s semester-long commemoration of Brown will fan their tiny flame of hope for desegregation into a bonfire.
At age 50, Brown v. Board may be feeble and limping badly, they said, b
ut it isn’t dead yet.
http://www.detnews.com/2004/schools/0401/0...9/a01-31395.htm
Good News: 50 years later, school segregation persists
Makeup of U.S. classrooms shows cures elusive as anniversary of historic court decision nears
By Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling that remains a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.
And yet the case, Brown v. Board of Edu
ation, ultimately failed to accomplish its main goal: desegregate schools.
As America prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark legal decision, segregation persists — even thrives

12; in classrooms across the country, according to sociologists and civil rights advocates.
Some of the worst racial isolation exists in Detroit and Michigan, they said.
“It’s going backwards,” said Gary Orfiel
d, a Harvard education professor who co-directs the school’s Civil Rights Project.
“The schools are profoundly unequal and no one has any plans” to fix them.
On Monday, the University of Michigan will kick off a semester-long commemoration of the legal ruling by hosting a lecture by two daughters of the lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown.
A study by the Civil Rights Project last year found that, even as the nation’s population has grown more diverse, white schools have gotten whiter and black schools more black.
T
he Harvard report showed that 70 percent of blacks attend schools with mostly minority students. The last time students were this racially isolated was in 1968, it said.
By overturning a separat
e-but-equ
al legal doctrine that had existed since the late 1800s, the Brown decision removed segregation from the law books. But it never struck it from people’s hearts, sociologists said.
The difference between the 1950s and today is that the current ver
sion of segregation came about by choice. Which leaves civil rights leaders wondering: Is this progress?
With their dream deferred, they focus instead on ensuring that black schools are treated the same as those frequented by whites. Separate but equal may be their best hope.
Mind-set overturned
In the early 1950s, it wasn’t just schools that were legally segregated in the South. It was restaurants, buses, water fountains.
Racial separation was a deeply ingrained way of life.
Into this emotio
nal morass, laden with messy overtures of slavery and racism, stepped the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was 347 U.S. 483, titled Brown et al v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas. <
br>
With unl
awyerly simplicity, the court dispatched the separate-but-equal principle, finding that it interfered with the education of blacks by making them feel inferior.
“We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no
place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the court stated.
While the ruling eventually stumbled in bringing lasting desegregation, it helped change the course of American history by boosting the fledgling civil rights movement, historians said.
It provided the legal basis that was used to loosen the underpinnings of segregation laws beyond the schoolroom. With Jim Crow in retreat, blacks eventually won a measure of equality in jobs and housing.
Girl becomes symbol
Movements need symbols, and in the Brown case it was the 8-year-old daughter of the lead plaintiff.
Linda Brown played with white children in the street and had them over for
dinner and sleep-ove
rs. But she wasn’t allowed to go to school with them.
“I didn’t realize skin color was keeping the two groups separate,” said Linda Brown Thompson, who is now an educational consultant.
Every morning, she woke up several hours earlier than her white friends and trudge
d past homeless men in a railroad switching yard on her way to catch a bus, which took her two miles to a black school.
Sometimes it rained and sometimes it snowed as she waited for the bus, she said. Sometimes it was so cold she returned home in tears.
The walk to the bus was seven blocks. A white school was four blocks from her front steps.
Brown wondered why she couldn’t go to school with her friends, but there’s only so much a parent could explain to a th
ird-grader.
Her mother simply told her: “You’re as good and special as anyone.”
Fight wasn’t over
When the NAACP won Brown v. Board in
1954, some members of the
civil rights organization thought the fight over desegregated schools was over.
Instead, it marked the beginning of a half-century of battles and lost causes: busing, theme schools, court-ordered oversight, billions of dollars in spending.
In the South, gains in integration have been reversed and, in many parts of the No
rth, it has never been addressed in a meaningful way, educators said.
“While we have come a long way since the 1954 decision, we still have many many miles to travel,” said Lester Monts, University of Michigan senior vice provost for academic affairs. “We are not there yet, even after 50 years.”
It didn’t take long for problems to begin with the Brown decision. In a follow-up case a year later, dubbed Brown II, the Sup
reme Court ruled that the schools should be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.”
Opponents used the vagueness of the phrase to do nothing for the next decade, his
torians said. By 1964, 98 perce
nt of the blacks in the South continued to attend schools that were all black.
It was only after rulings in several other court cases that schools began to integrate in the mid-1960s. The trend continued through the next two decades, but then began to reverse itself.
“The segregation was institutionalized,” said Linda Ti
llman, an associate professor at Wayne State University who has studied race and education. “It never went away completely.”
Half of cases dismissed
Desegregation stopped where it started: in the Supreme Court.
By the beginning of the 1990s, a now conservative high court looked askance at the court-appointed desegregation plans across the South and some parts of the North, Tillman said. By the end of the de
cade, nearly 50 desegregation cases had been dismissed.
Free from judicial oversight, many school districts moved back toward racial isolation. The South had gone from desegre
gation to resegregation.
Desp
ite a decade of resegregation in the South, its schools remain more integrated today than those in the North, researchers said.
That’s because integration never came to many Northern classrooms. And the reason for that lies with a legal case focused on Detroit.
In 1971, a federal judge approved a plan to bus Detroit students to the suburbs and suburb
an students to the city. Most of the city students were black while those in the suburbs were white.
The judge, Stephen Roth, was trying to remedy what he had found to be intentional segregation in the Detroit school system.
But the Supreme Court nullified his action in 1974. The high court said the suburbs couldn’t be included in the busing plan unless they caused the segregation.
The ruling ma
rked a shift in thinking by the Supreme Court and was the first serious legal setback for desegregation supporters in the 20 years since the Brown decision, said William L. Taylor
, a longtime civil rights attorney based in
Washington.
More importantly, it stopped other large, metro areas in the North from adopting cross-busing plans with their suburbs.
“The timing was terrible,” Taylor said. “The Supreme Court had never addressed the question in the North. They had no rules to deal with.”
Geography plays a role
The North practiced a type of segregati
on that was more subtle than the Southern version and, therefore, tougher to confront, scholars said.
While schools in the South were segregated by law, those in the North were racially separated by geography. The school segregation mirrored the residential segregation. As inner cities got more black and suburbs more white, their schools did the same.
It was one thing to strike down
an antiquated Southern law. It was quite another to tell Northerners where they could live.
The North underwent a vicious cycle as residential segregation led to school
segregation, which led to more residential isol
ation as more whites fled what they perceived as poor city schools.
In 1954, 84 percent of the students in Detroit public schools were white, according to school statistics. Today, it’s 3.7 percent.
Two types of schools
And so it comes down to this: A half century after the Brown decision, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 38 years after the beginning of busing, A
merica has two types of schools: those the poor are forced to attend and those selected by the middle class, which exercises its choice by having the financial freedom to decide where to live.
Supporters of desegregation say their goal isn’t for blacks to go to a white school, but rather to attend a middle-class one.
Segregation by race is closely related
to segregation by income, and poverty heavily influences learning, they said. The poor schools are burdened with low test scores, weak curriculums, less qualified teachers
and students less likely to go to college.
&#
8220;I don’t think it was about black and white schools,” said Bill Brooks, chairman of the Detroit Public Schools reform board. “We need to make sure funds are allocated to all school districts.”
School segregation is especially severe in Detroit and Michigan.
A Detroit News analysis in 2002 found that most students in Metro Detroit attend schools where they are the same race as 90 perce
nt of their classmates.
With little public outcry for desegregation, supporters, unsure how to revive the issue, may be entering the twilight of their campaign.
Race can be considered
But, in June, a tiny flame was lit in the gathering darkness. And it happened, of all places, in Michigan.
In a case involving the University
of Michigan, the Supreme Court ruled that the educational benefits of diversity made it permissible to consider race as one of several factors in evaluating an applica
nt.
“It’s a big turning point,” sa
id U-M spokesman Joe Serwach. “It was considered by some as a once-in-a-generation case.”
Among those celebrating is the university itself, which views the ruling as kin and kind to one in Brown v. Board of Education.
Some hope the school’s semester-long commemoration of Brown will fan their tiny flame of hope for desegregation into a bonfire.
At age 50, Brown v. Board may be feeble and limping badly, they said, b
ut it isn’t dead yet.