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September 7,
2005
By Professor
Gary Orfield and Chungmei
Lee
A third of a century ago the schools of the South became the most integrated in the nation, a stunning reversal of a long history of educational apartheid written into the state laws and constitutions of the eleven states of the Confederacy and the six Border states, stretching from Oklahoma to Delaware, all of which had legally imposed de jure segregation until the Supreme Court prohibited it in 1954. From being almost completely segregated in their own schools, more than two-fifths of black students in the South were attending majority white schools and many more were in schools with significant diversity at the height of integration.
Reversing the historic pattern, almost all of the Southern and Border states became more integrated than most Northern states with significant black enrollment.
Since the l980s, the tremendous progress in the
South has been slowly eroding year by year as black
students and the exploding population of Latino
students become more isolated from white students.
In some of the states which were most successful
in achieving integration, the reversal has been
much more rapid.
The Southern and Border states were the leaders
in urban desegregation following the Supreme Court’s
l971 Swann decision and
these regions saw major efforts at something experienced
nowhere in the North: comprehensive city-suburban
desegregation in many of the largest urban communities.
This was because the Supreme Court blocked desegregation
between the city and suburban districts in the
l974 Milliken decision and only the South
had substantial numbers of major cities where the
city and suburban schools were in a single county-wide
school system. Those
plans proved to be particularly effective in radically
reducing racial separation over long periods of
time, and their dismantling since the Supreme Court
supported the ending of desegregation plans in
the 1991 Dowell v.Oklahoma City has produced
large and rapid increases in segregation where
advances in desegregation were most prevalent.
This is particularly unfortunate because those
plans did produce high and relatively stable levels
of desegregation and eliminate the kind of extremely
segregated and unequal ghetto schools that characterize
the urban North. There is also striking new evidence
that the city-suburban plans produced substantially
lower levels of housing segregation than were experienced
in communities with separate city and suburban
school districts.
Latino enrollment has quadrupled as a share of
the nation’s enrollment since l968 and, though
the South is the center of black population in
the nation, Latino enrollment is soaring. Given
the rapid surge in Latino enrollment,
this report shows Latino students to be even more
segregated than blacks in the South in the 2003-4
school year. Unfortunately little was ever done
in most of the region to desegregate Latinos and
many desegregation plans have been terminated without
ever addressing the issue even as the Latino communities
have become much larger and more isolated. When
the school desegregation battle began in the region
the focus was overwhelmingly on issues of black
students being confined to separate schools that
were unequal in many respects. Except in Texas,
where Latino Civil Rights advocates in the G.I.
Forum had been actively fighting segregation of
Mexican American children, the issue of Latino
segregation was largely ignored. In fact, in the
early days, some districts including Houston and
Miami-Dade counted Latino students as whites and
used them to “desegregate” black students,
often bringing together two disadvantaged groups.
Most of the major desegregation plans of the region
were in place before the Supreme Court explicitly
recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregate
in the 1973 Keyes decision and they were
never modified to take that decision into account.
The key decision that led to major desegregation
of the South was the l991 Dowell decision,
in which the Supreme Court authorized the termination
of the desegregation plan in Oklahoma City, ending
desegregation rights in a large city where the
enrollment growth was being driven by Latinos in
a community where the desegregation plan ignored
Latinos.
This report begins by showing the patterns of
segregation and desegregation of various groups,
regions and
states by using data from 1968 until present day.
It examines both the changes over the last decade
(1991-2003) as well as those over a much longer
period (1954-2003). In the context of growing diversity
in our nation’s public schools, it is increasingly
important to examine the gains brought about by
school desegregation as well as the increasingly
multiracial nature of segregation for the growing
Latino population in the South and the reality
of resegregation in many of the Southern and Border
states for black and white students.
To view the COMPLETE REPORT
and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:
New Faces,
Old Patterns? Segregation in the Multiracial
South
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