'Brown' Revisited.
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| Title: | 'Brown' Revisited. |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | White, Forrest R. |
| Source: | Phi Delta Kappan. Sep 1994 76(1):12-20. |
| Peer Reviewed: | N |
| Page Count: | 9 |
| Publication Date: | 1994 |
| Document Type: | Reports - Evaluative Journal Articles |
| Descriptors: | De Facto Segregation, Desegregation Effects, Educational History, Elementary Secondary Education, Racial Discrimination |
| Laws, Policies and Program Identifiers: | Brown v Board of Education |
| ISSN: | 0031-7217 |
| Abstract: | The 1954 "Brown" decision and its 1955 enforcement decree were merely keystone events in a decade-long effort to replace South's elaborate system of legal segregation with type of de facto segregation found in northern, western, and midwestern cities resulting from well-defined racial barriers between neighborhoods. The traditional histories have largely ignored the back-room, southern planning sessions to forestall desegregation. (MLH) |
| Entry Date: | 1995 |
| Accession Number: | EJ489358 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN9409231498;PDK01SEP.94;1995Feb01.10:48;v1.1</anid> <title id="AN9409231498-1">BROWN REVISITED </title> <hd id="AN9409231498-2"> The school desegregation battle passed relatively quickly, Mr. White points out--but the scars of the efforts to forestall desegregation are far more lasting and can still be seen today. </hd> <p>ALTHOUGH THE conventional view of Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et al., decided by the United States Supreme Court 40 years ago last May,1 is that the ruling came as a bolt from the blue, only the extent of the decree actually came as a surprise to most of those who were charged with the planning and leadership of southern cities. There is now compelling evidence to suggest that the 1954 Brown decision and its enforcement decree a year later were merely the keystone events in a decade-long effort to replace the South's elaborate system of legal (de jure) segregation with the type of de facto segregation found in northern, western, and midwestern cities as a result of well-defined racial barriers between neighborhoods. </p> <p>That there would be some sort of decision from the Court overruling at least a portion of the South's elaborate system of segregated education was a foregone conclusion among many southern leaders; clearly, the "separate but equal" facilities maintained by communities, particularly those in rural areas, were so far from equivalent that only the most callous Court could disregard the distinction. Moreover, the nation was already desegregating its facilities for the military, for interstate transportation, for public accommodation, and for recreation--either through administrative action or through legal intervention--and it was hard to imagine that a country that had so recently committed itself to fighting oppressors overseas would allow its own public schools to remain bastions of racial subjugation at home. </p> <p>It now appears that the individuals charged with the leadership and management of southern cities had ample time, opportunity, and motivation to prepare for the legally mandated demise of segregated schools and facilities in their communities; that they started making plans in anticipation of such a ruling long before the Brown case was ever decided; and that their preparations grew increasingly intense as the prospect of court-ordered integration became more and more real. Furthermore, it seems that these leaders took deliberate steps to use all the powers at their disposal--both direct (those related to the control of school construction, educational administration, and student attendance) and indirect (those that fall under the headings of redevelopment, city planning, the enforcement of codes, and urban renewal)--to forestall court-ordered school desegregation in the South. The impact of their preemptive actions has been almost as profound as the Brown decision itself and can still be seen today in carefully contrived boundaries of school zones and neighborhoods, mis-sized and misplaced school buildings, demolished housing, redeveloped properties, and inappropriate use of municipal land. </p> <p>Thus, although the decade of the 1950s was a time in which a carefully planned and executed legal assault on school desegregation finally bore fruit, it was also the era in which the impact of the High Court's ruling was largely minimized and even negated in many communities by an equally well-planned and quietly orchestrated underground resistance. Unfortunately, the traditional histories of this decade have focused almost entirely on the shouting match that was going on in the streets and in the legislative corridors and have largely ignored the far more consequential planning sessions that were taking place in the back rooms of city halls across the South. </p> <hd id="AN9409231498-3"> A Shifting Population </hd> <p>Even without the school desegregation controversy, the 1950s would have been a challenging enough time for school boards and municipal leaders in the urban South. The mass migration of blacks from the rural South had originally been directed toward the northern cities, but after World War II it shifted destinations to include the major southern urban centers. Most of the older cities of the South did not have a central ghetto or black district, as did their northern counterparts; instead, almost every white middle-class neighborhood had a small concentration of blacks living nearby, from which it drew its domestic workers.2 Since both the housing and the schools were strictly segregated, in accordance with state laws, the burden of maintaining separate-race schools was borne almost exclusively by black children, who had to be bused across town to achieve racially separate schools. This was exactly the situation outlawed in the Brown case--Linda Brown was being bused past the white schools in Topeka, Kansas--and it was the circumstance most directly under attack from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).4 </p> <p>The changing pattern of black migration was not, however, the only force defining the need for municipal planning and redevelopment activities. The military build-up that had taken place during World War II continued through the Korean conflict and on into the Cold War era, placing enormous pressures on Sunbelt cities to plan for the influx of people and industries. Veterans returning from the war and their "baby boom" offspring began to create their own demands for more housing, schools, shopping centers, and public services. In short, the 1950s saw shifts in population, housing, and land use, especially in the urban South, and it was here that the tools of redevelopment, land use planning, school planning, and urban renewal really came of age.5 </p> <hd id="AN9409231498-4"> Legal Precedents </hd> <p>Attempting to overturn centuries of discrimination, prejudice, tradition, and both statutory and unwritten codes of behavior was also a lengthy process. In the 1930s the NAACP--under the leadership of Charles Houston, dean of the Law School at Howard University, and Thurgood Marshall, his young protege who was later to serve as a Supreme Court justice--launched a withering legal attack on the peculiar logic that provided the basis for maintaining segregated schools. Although the NAACP's assault was at first aimed at discrimination in graduate education, the intent was clearly to amass an irrefutable body of precedent that would lead to a decision striking down once and for all the notion that separate schools could be equal in American society. </p> <p>In the major first victory, Gaines v. Missouri (1938), the Supreme Court struck down the argument that a government could avoid the responsibility of operating a school for blacks (in this case, a law school) when it preserved one exclusively for whites.6 Even though Missouri helped to send its black law students to schools in other states, the logic of the NAACP was convincing to the nine lawyers who served as justices on the Court: they understood that there were certain powerful advantages associated with attending a law school in the state in which one intended to practice. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Court decided that the makeshift law school provided for blacks by the state of Texas to avoid the Gaines precedent could not provide equal educational experience for blacks.7 Again the lawyers on the Court were sympathetic to the argument that a law school that lacked an adequate law library, a distinguished faculty, and many of the other trappings of a high-quality legal education was clearly inferior and therefore unequal. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950), the Court found that separate treatment of blacks, even when they were allowed to attend the same school as whites, was also unconstitutional discrimination. The plaintiff in this case had been forced to sit in the hall outside of his classes, had been given only limited access to the library, and had been subjected to other degrading treatment designed to limit his contact with the white students.8 </p> <p>Knowledgeable southerners knew that the U.S. Supreme Court would follow these precedents if it were faced with similar circumstances in public education (i.e., the absence of any facility for blacks, separate facilities for blacks that could be shown to be inadequate or inferior, or instances of separate and degrading treatment of black students). Four of the five cases accepted by the Court in its 1952 session had to do with precisely those issues. </p> <p>In addition to the case that is the fo-cus of this article, Brown v. Board of Education, the Court was presented with three other appeals that were based on--the Sweatt, Gaines, and McLaurin precedents. In Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, the Court was faced with a county that did not provide a senior high school for black pupils. Since those black students who wished to attend high school were bused to another county, the NAACP contended that, in line with the Gaines and Sweatt decisions, such an arrangement was separate and unequal treatment in terms of the physical plant provided, the curriculum, and the extensive transportation required.9 </p> <p>In Briggs v. Elliot, the NAACP argued that the physical facilities for blacks in Clarendon County, South Carolina, were inferior to those provided for whites. The case was designed to follow the Sweatt precedent: the schools for blacks in the county were older hand-me-downs from the white community, and many lacked playgrounds, ball fields, cafeterias, libraries, auditoriums, and other facilities that were present in the newer schools serving whites. In addition, this case featured a whole new realm of social/psychological research that pointed to the low self-esteem of the black children who attended these inferior schools. </p> <p>To support the NAACP's contention in Gebhart v. Belton, university researchers in Delaware amassed a large body of literature to show that black schools in that state were inferior to white ones in terms of pupil/teacher ratios, teacher training, extracurricular activities, school supplies, library books, and other measures of curricular and instructional support. The plaintiffs hoped to play on the Sweatt decision and promote a finding that separate instructional programs, even in otherwise similar physical facilities, could be shown to be inferior and thus contrary to the equal protection provisions of the U.S. Constitution.10 </p> <p>The fact that the cases were first heard in the fall of 1952, re-argued during the 1953 session of the Court, and finally decided on 17 May 1954 gave the South plenty of time to prepare for the eventuality of an adverse ruling. Once Brown was decided, the Court held a second hearing on enforcement in April 1955,11 and it was not until 31 May 1955, almost three years after the initial cases had been accepted for review, that the Supreme Court issued its implementing decree requiring desegregation "with all deliberate speed." Even then, in mandating that school districts make a "prompt and reasonable start towards full compliance," the Court recognized that a "transition period" would be necessary before such compliance could be achieved. Nevertheless, the justices indicated that courts could "consider problems related to administration,... the physical condition of the school plant, the school transportation system, personnel,... and attendance areas [in order] to achieve a sys-tem of determining admission to public schools on a nonracial basis."12 </p> <hd id="AN9409231498-5"> From De Jure to De Facto Segregation </hd> <p>Although most southern leaders expected to lose the Davis (no equal facilities), Briggs (unequal facilities), and Gebhart (unequal instructional programs) cases, in which the quantifiable differences between schools serving blacks and those serving whites could be remedied in ways that stopped short of desegregation, the outcome of Brown proved to be the most troublesome, since what was at issue could be remediated only by school integration. Even if the South were to build literally hundreds of new and largely unneeded schools, it still might have to integrate some buildings in order to comply with the Brown dictate that similarly situated students not receive separate treatment just to maintain racial separation. The Brown precedent, because it focused on the long crosstown bus ride, cut to the core of what many urban southern leaders, both black and white, felt was most unjust about the separate but equal system of education that had evolved in most of their cities. </p> <p>The most immediate effect of the Brown decision was to strike down the laws requiring segregated schools--i.e., de jure segregation-- in 17 states (Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) and the laws permitting segregated schools in four other states (Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming).13 Clearly, the decision would have considerable impact on the local schools of thousands of communities across the Deep South and in such border states of the Confederacy as Maryland and Kentucky. A more hidden, but just as important, repercussion of the decision would be its impact on community planning, politics, and redevelopment, which up to this time had been just as completely tied to the legal strictures of segregation as had the southern schools. </p> <p>The Supreme Court left intact the kind of separate-race schools that were more typically found in the cities of the North, West, and Midwest--regions of de facto segregation. This type of segregation, defended as a "natural" outgrowth of an individual's choice of neighborhoods, was considered legitimate. Thus substantially equal schools that served separate-race neighborhoods were still permitted by the Court; only the particular circumstance presented by Linda Brown--a black living closer to a white school than to a black one--was initially found unconstitutional. At least one major study of integration in 24 northern, western, and midwestern cities found that even in the areas of the country that had already desegregated, most schools could clearly be designated as single-race institutions.14 </p> <p>Thus, as community leaders all across the South raced to discern the implications of the Brown decision, they found that some forms of segregation were still permitted. By carefully following the practices of northern, western, and midwestern cities, most communities in the border states could comply with the dictates of the Court with only minimal integration, and most of their schools could continue as essentially single-race schools except in the few areas of each city that were racially mixed or in transition or where two racially distinct neighborhoods would have to be served by the same school. Even then, the cities outside the South that had already desegregated had evolved an elaborate system of gerrymandered school districts, liberal transfer policies, "schools of choice," staggered enrollment procedures, in-school segregation by tracking, and other quasi-legal devices to avoid larger-scale integration or to ensure that whites would not have to attend predominantly black schools.15 Community leaders in the South realized that some of these same techniques could potentially be applied to other facilities besides schools. They were strongly motivated to attempt to impose these lawful patterns of de facto segregation on schools and to work them into a wide range of local decisions regarding planning, redevelopment, and use of community facilities. </p> <p>This careful distinction between continued segregation by place of residence and outright defiance of court-ordered integration was one of the chief reasons that reactions to the Brown decree were fairly mild in most of the border states, which had relatively small black populations that were for the most part concentrated in large, central, and overcrowded downtown sections of cities and were only occasionally found in small, scattered settlements in other parts of the cities. The distinction meant that the model of de facto segregation of schools and neighborhoods found elsewhere in the country could be adopted without undue hardship, except in those few cities of the Deep South that had very large concentrations of black population, a history of racial strife, or vast class distinctions between their white and their black populations that would render even minimal integration unacceptable to large segments of the white community.16 Although integrated facilities of any kind were opposed by the vast majority of white southerners, the prospect of large-scale race mixing in the public schools had southern leaders more concerned than any other aspect of desegregation. Indeed, several years before the Court actually rendered its call for desegregation, southern newspapers openly speculated about the magnitude of the reaction that would follow an adverse ruling: </p> <p>A decision of the Supreme Court that would provide for the admission of Negro students to public schools in areas where they would constitute a large proportion or a majority of the students might be the worst thing, rather than the best, that could happen in race relations where people of both races were not ready for such changes. The law is a living instrumentality, and if society must live under it, [then] the law must also live with society.17 </p> <p>While a number of communities in the border states, especially the larger cities, began almost immediately to take steps to comply with the dictates of the Court, the eight states of the Deep South in which blacks constituted 22% or more of the population (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia) did not integrate at all until they were pushed to the limit by the courts.18 In those states racial separation was more firmly entrenched--especially in those regions with the largest proportion of blacks in the population, a figure that could run as high as 70% to 80% in some rural areas. In these communities, desegregation meant not just the transfer of large numbers of blacks to previously all-white schools (a situation that was rare even in the areas of the country that had already desegregated) but also the assignment of whites to black schools--a practice that was almost unheard of anywhere else in the world.19 This requirement was largely responsible for the violent reaction to the Court's decree.20 </p> <p>Although blacks and whites lived and worked in closer proximity to one another in the South than in other parts of the country, the history of the region presaged a more intense reaction to a desegregation ruling than was likely elsewhere. Because of the sad history of slavery, the interactions between races had evolved from a master/slave relationship--a situation that did not pertain in northern and midwestern cities, where blacks were but one more immigrant group. The area's strong states' rights philosophy, adopted as much for racial considerations as for any other cause, meant that the authority of the Court was sure to be challenged. Southern leaders had every right to fear that a ruling requiring desegregation might cause deep disruptions in their way of life, their political stability, and their economic rejuvenation. </p> <p>Most of the contemporary studies of this era focused either on the communities in the border states that complied with the desegregation ruling (Baltimore; St. Louis; Topeka; Washington, D.C.; Chattanooga and Clinton, Tennessee; Louisville; and Wilmington)21 or on the legislative maneuvering of the states in the Deep South that resisted. When actions in the resistant communities were studied, the focus was on the events that occurred after the first blacks were finally assigned by the courts to previously all-white schools. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches took into account more than a decade of planning and action by school boards, city councils, planning commissions, housing authorities, and other municipal officials who joined in a quiet but concerted attempt to forestall the impact of the Brown decision. </p> <p>It is not surprising that local officials responded to the threat of court-ordered desegregation in the same manner as their counterparts in state capitals and the Congress and used every means at their disposal to frustrate, delay, or defuse the impact of desegregation on the schools and other public facilities in their communities. The lawyers of the NAACP legal defense team began filing court challenges against segregated schools, parks, beaches, and transportation facilities all across the nation shortly after Brown,22 and the local electorate was making the same kinds of demands as the statewide constituencies. Certainly, local officials were as adept as other elected officials at using whatever powers they possessed to frustrate and circumvent the dictates of the courts. </p> <p>Since most southern leaders were aware of both the long-standing legal attack on segregated schools and the various precedents involved in this battle,23 they immediately launched a wholesale effort to build new schools, parks, and playgrounds for blacks and thus to correct any obvious deficiencies in both funding and facilities. Several southern states were quick to adopt this approach while the Brown cases were still pending, hoping "to preserve segregation on a voluntary basis through [building] equal school facilities."24 In most cases, these efforts were backed by new taxing authority, new (sales) taxes, popular referendums, and other measures that indicated strong white support for building new schools and upgrading the dilapidated school facilities used by blacks. The states obviously were keeping an eye on the NAACP victories in higher education, because their attention was on more than just the physical facilities of the schools. New playgrounds, cafeterias, auditoriums, libraries, and other amenities were added to existing school buildings, and funding for teacher salaries, textbooks, supplies, and training was increased to ensure that segregation would continue even if such "separate" facilities were required to be truly "equal"--the expected decree from the Court.25 In many areas of the South there was such a rush to equalize facilities that a number of communities soon found that they were spending more to educate black students than white ones.26 </p> <p>Although local school boards and political leaders all across the South were initially resigned to desegregation and convinced that they could "handle" it without doing irreparable harm to public education,27 they soon found that the state legislatures were erecting legal barriers to ensure that local schools, parks, playgrounds, and other public facilities would stay segregated. Those areas that attempted to comply with the Court's decree at the outset (i.e., Washington, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Wilmington) began to experience an unexpected level of racial turmoil that gave moderates in the Deep South cause for concern.28 Hostility--first to the Brown decision and later to the Supreme Court--began to grow as southerners realized that their own communities would be granted little or no transition time. The NAACP kept up its legal pressures, and soon both the intent and the authority of the judiciary to enforce its integration orders were becoming clear as the federal courts ordered such segregated institutions as state parks, city recreation facilities, and public bus systems to desegregate.29 </p> <p>A number of communities began to adopt a "wait and see" attitude, delaying new projects until they could better discern the impact of the courts' decisions. By 1956 Mississippi was reporting that only a third of its counties had actually complied with the plan to "equalize" black schools;30 Arkansas experienced similar delays in its own districts immediately after the Brown decision;31 and Virginia newspapers indicated that "there was no longer any great pressure on local officials . . . to continue the special and costly attention to Negro school building programs."32 When communities once again began to build schools in the period following Brown, the dictates of that ruling were critical in determining the location and size of new buildings. Communities abandoned sites under consideration if they were found to be too close to racial dividing lines and turned instead to new locations that could continue to carry a single-race designation. </p> <p>Although initially many southern leaders assumed that blacks in their communities would be content with equal facilities, they realized that they were mistaken when they saw local blacks aligned with the NAACP efforts to desegregate schools, parks, playgrounds, and beaches through the courts. At first southerners tended to blame this shift in blacks' attitudes on "outsiders" and even to see it as a "communist plot"--a reaction that had also surfaced in several northern and midwestern cities in which the white community opposed school desegregation.33 Just as in the cities of the border states that had already desegregated, race relations in a number of communities in the Deep South began to deteriorate as whites became aware that the blacks wanted to desegregate all schools and public facilities.34 This growing feeling of animosity between the races found other outlets in the politics and civic life of most communities, so that the coming crisis over school desegregation affected almost every aspect of racial dialogue. Moreover, those few local school boards that did persist in their efforts to keep harmony between the races soon found themselves isolated by both the black community and the white one.35 </p> <hd id="AN9409231498-6"> Interposition </hd> <p>In November 1955 James Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, began to promote the doctrine of "interposition"--a long-lost constitutional interpretation that compels states to "interpose" their own authority in order to protect their citizens from unjust actions of the federal government--as the answer to continuing segregation. The idea was an immediate hit and soon dominated the rhetoric of southern politicians, even in the border states that had already begun to desegregate. Within 18 months after Kilpatrick began to promote interposition as a valid legal doctrine, all eight of the states of the Deep South had passed formal interposition resolutions and a number of laws designed to use the police powers of their states to enforce segregation of their schools, parks, and playgrounds.36 Since it was the potential integration of the schools that caused the most public panic, the interposition argument was pushed to its greatest extreme in defense of segregated education. Even so, the states were not without creativity in their attempt to preserve segregation in other facilities, even going so far as to turn their state parks over to private contractors as a ruse to continue racial discrimination.37 </p> <p>In addition to the anti-NAACP laws that were enacted in most of the states of the Deep South, eight states passed pupil placement laws designed to block transfers between white schools and black ones, six states authorized the closing of public schools under the threat of integration, four states provided financial aid to students who attended private schools to escape court-ordered desegregation, and most weakened their laws on compulsory attendance, teacher salaries, pupil transportation, the term of teacher contracts, and the like.38 Each of these laws was an attempt to delay desegregation by forcing the courts to peel away a layer of state government that had been interposed between the local schools and the courts. The doctrine of interposition was at the heart of the Southern Manifesto as well. Signed by 100 southern senators and congressmen, the manifesto proclaimed that integration was "contrary to established law" and professed that government officials had a duty to resist integration "with every legal means" at their disposal.39 </p> <p>Although most of the rhetoric of interposition was emanating from state political leaders, most of the active efforts to block the federal courts were undertaken by local school officials because they possessed the most direct powers to manage public schools, assign pupils, manipulate attendance zones, build new buildings, and otherwise control the racial composition of classrooms. Soon, however, local governments found that some of the same tactics that could be used to block the desegregation of schools had wide applications in preserving segregated neighborhoods as well. Suddenly the race was on to rezone, rebuild, and redevelop the cities in an all-out effort to create well-defined color barriers between neighborhoods, to isolate black populations, to demolish mixed-race areas, to relocate integrated schools, and otherwise to create an even more segregated soci-ety than had existed before Brown. </p> <p>Foremost among the local powers of interposition were the ability actually to assign individual students to schools and the authority to control the size and shape of school attendance zones. At least seven states relied on the creative use of pupil assignment as a way to deter integration.40 Several factors other than the race of the students could be used to support the creation of school attendance zones: the distance from home to school, the maximum utilization of school space, transportation considerations, topographical barriers, and the conformity of institutions (which was meant to prevent frequent transfers).41 </p> <p>Northern and midwestern cities intent on limiting integration already relied heavily on their authority to draw boundary lines that reflected the racial characteristics of the neighborhoods rather than the locations of the schools,42 and it did not take long for southern school officials to become just as adept at blocking desegregation with this technique. When faced with court-ordered desegregation, the city of Charlottesville,Virginia, for instance, divided itself into six elementary school zones; the lines of one of the "black" zones were so carefully drawn that the area included almost all the black students who had applied to go to previously all-white schools.43 </p> <p>Southern leaders also found that the federal courts would grant them broad leeway to exercise their "administrative discretion" in matters of construction and zoning--even if administrative discretion had the same effect, because of prevailing housing patterns, as designating a building as a "white" or "black" facility. Several practices related to determining the location and size of new buildings and limiting attendance zones had been used for decades in northern cities to limit integration.44 The careful location of schools and other public buildings for the purpose of minimizing integration was not only accepted by the courts but also strongly urged by newspaper editor Kilpatrick, who was fast becoming the chief spokesman for southern defiance. "A great part of the problem, especially in the cities, could be handled by the relocation of school buildings and the gerrymandering of enrollment lines," he counseled. The Richmond school board, under the leadership of Lewis Powell, Jr., who was later to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, responded to Kilpatrick's advice by building several new schools in black neighborhoods.45 Norfolk created one new school by pushing six mobile classrooms off the back of a truck a few weeks after the federal district court released the addresses of the plaintiffs in its own school desegregation suit.46 The undisputed administrative authority of the local boards extended even to the assignment of a general racial designation to a facility. Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, both turned formerly all-white elementary schools over to their black school systems in order to deter an impending desegregation ruling from the courts.47 Norfolk even built six minischools, with five rooms each, to ensure the single-race composition of their attendance zones.48 </p> <p>Thus in the period immediately following the Brown decision, almost every school board and governmental agency in the South was focusing on the proximity of black students to white schools.49 The realization was growing that school boards, city councils, and other public agencies were not powerless before the courts. Legal scholars were careful to point out that "the Constitution ... does not require integration. It merely forbids discrimination. It does not forbid such discrimination as occurs as a result of voluntary action [such as choice of residence, neighborhood, or city]."50 </p> <p>City councils, although generally more reluctant than their school boards to take overt actions to block the federal courts, were just as motivated to use every legal means at their disposal to delay or deter the threat of school desegregation, even going so far as to appropriate school funds on a month-to-month basis so as to intimidate black leaders and keep their school boards in check.51 Although most of the cities' powers were related to urban renewal--redevelopment, planning, zoning, enforcement of codes, and economic development--and not to schools, southern cities were quick to learn that they possessed a potent arsenal of tools that could be used to block integration. </p> <p>Closing a threatened school was a community's most obvious defense when faced with a court order to desegregate, and school-closing powers lay at the heart of Virginia's "Massive Resistance" statutes--the governor was required to close any integrated public school--and at the heart of its more unofficial system of providing public support for segregated (white) private schools. Schools in Norfolk, Arlington, and Charlottesville were closed by the state for most of the 1958-59 school year, locking out 10,000 white students in Norfolk alone. Prince Edward County, however, provided the best example of Virginia's Massive Resistance plan: public schools there were closed for several years while a white private academy flourished with state-supported tuition grants. </p> <p>Even though closing schools was thought to be the ultimate weapon in the fight against school desegregation, closing whole neighborhoods was even more destructive, and it was the application of municipal powers related to urban renewal that had the most lasting effect on the South. Robert Weaver, who was then director of the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, has written that, "in a few southern cities ... urban renewal too often seemed to be an instrument for wiping out racially integrated living."52 This was certainly the case in Norfolk, where a frantic second stage of redevelopment tore down the homes of almost 20,000 people--nearly one-tenth of the population--in little more than a year. Unlike earlier redevelopment efforts, this one did not focus on substandard multifamily structures in central city slums, although Norfolk still had plenty of those. Instead, most of the houses that were destroyed were safe, decent, and even modern homes of middle-class families living on the edge of downtown. Their sudden demolition had little to do with the quality of housing; rather, demolition was driven by the fact that the houses were located in the mixed-race neighborhoods where all the plaintiffs in the city's school desegregation suit lived.53 </p> <p>Just as effective as tearing down all the houses in a neighborhood was the selective renewal of mixed-race areas or the resizing of neighborhoods with the careful placement of public land. Some cities--notably Mobile, Alabama--relied on their interstate highways to divide neighborhoods and school attendance zones into racially distinct areas.54 Others, when faced with a situation in which black students lived closer to white schools than to black ones, used their powers to acquire additional land for parks, playgrounds, state colleges, industrial parks, or other public purposes, thereby placing topographical barriers between neighborhoods and thus preserving the racial character of their schools. St. Louis and Baltimore appear to have employed a combination of natural geographic barriers and selective redevelopment to keep blacks confined to racially distinct school attendance zones.55 </p> <p>Just as school boards could manipulate attendance zones, cities could change their own size through merger and annexation and thus alter the pattern of school attendance. When Newport News was faced with court-ordered desegregation in 1958, for instance, the city merged with Warwick County, and the resultant ripple effect on school attendance zones allowed it to delay integration successfully for another year.56 Richmond also used this strategy effectively, and at least one study has indicated that this city's efforts to annex surrounding counties was motivated largely by racial considerations.57 </p> <p>Thus the local governments--even more than the states--had at their disposal a large arsenal of powers that could be "interposed" between the courts and the schools to create segregated neighborhoods, enforce well-defined color barriers, isolate black populations, relocate integrated schools, and otherwise forestall court-ordered school desegregation. This was certainly the charge by plaintiffs in a number of school desegregation suits--a claim in part supported by demographic researchers and other social scientists, but they have chosen to blame school boards rather than redevelopment authorities, planning commissions, or city councils.58 Most educational researchers have chosen to focus on the political implications of decisions that were made by school boards only when they actually faced a court order to desegregate. Thus they lend credence to the theory that, in most communities, the school boards were the villains. </p> <p>The truth is that school boards were merely being dragged along in the planning, redevelopment, and housing activities of other local officials; that is, the placement of schools and the drawing of new attendance zones in many cities were only the last acts in a far more elaborate plot to replace de jure segregation with de facto segregation. In fact, southern cities appear to have used their powers of urban renewal to forestall school desegregation more often in the 1950s than in the 1960s, the decade for which more extensive documentation exists. Not only was the motivation perhaps stronger in the 1950s, but also community groups and the courts were less inclined to scrutinize actions that bore the imprint of racial planning--partly because up to that point all planning in the South, and in most of the rest of the nation as well, was designed to support the "separate but equal" and "neighborhoods of choice" concepts that were legally permissible for several years after Brown.59 </p> <p>IN LIGHT OF the enormous controversy surrounding school desegregation, it is not hard to see how the same tools that could be used to promote new growth could just as easily be enlisted in the effort to prevent certain land uses, especially those related to integrated school districts. The building boom that was already going on in most southern communities provided ample opportunity to apply the powers of urban renewal to the preservation of segregated schools. In addition, in the older cities of the South, there was a feeling of urgency prompted by situations in which blacks lived in closer proximity to white schools than to their own. It was when these two factors--opportunity and urgency--were present to a large degree that redevelopment projects, the building of new schools and highways, and other public initiatives were undertaken, partly to achieve racially segregated school districts--that is, to move with all deliberate speed from de jure to de facto segregation. </p> <p>Thurgood Marshall and the lawyers at Howard University who plotted the demise of school segregation laws for the NAACP knew that it would take years to overthrow the legal structure that both established separate-race schools and kept them unequal. They knew as well that it would take decades to overcome centuries of prejudice and the peculiar social and political conventions that supported segregated schools. They did not know, however, that they were up against forces in the South that were even then working just as hard to undermine and counteract their efforts. And they never contemplated that these same forces would be willing to wreak long-term havoc on their own communities--to close schools, demolish neighborhoods, artificially divide cities, and manipulate the size and location of school buildings--just to preserve an outdated social doctrine. </p> <p>The school desegregation battle passed relatively quickly, leaving only a few brief, but indelible memories--federal troops in Little Rock, padlocked schools in Norfolk, George Wallace blocking the doors to Ole Miss--before de jure segregation faded forever from the national scene. Unfortunately, the scars of the effort to forestall desegregation through interposition are far more lasting and can still be seen today in mis-sized and misplaced schools, needlessly demolished homes and neighborhoods, poorly and hastily contrived urban renewal efforts, and highways created partly to divide residential zones. </p> <p>1.0liver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et al., reprinted in Race Relations Law Reporter, February 1956, p. 8. </p> <p>2.Karl E. Taueber and Alma F. Taueber, Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1965), pp. 23-122. </p> <p>3."And WhoWas Brown? Well...," Southern School News, September 1958, p. 1. </p> <p>4.Walter G. Stephan, "A Brief Historical Overview of School Desegregation," in Walter G. Stephan and Joe R. Feagin, eds., School Desegregation:Past, Present, and Future (New York:Plenum Press, 1980), p. 13. </p> <p>5.Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). </p> <p>6.Robert A. Leflar, "Law of the Land: The Courts and the Schools," in Don Shoemaker, ed., "With All Deliberate Speed" (New York: Harper &amp; Brothers, 1957), p. 1. </p> <p>7.Brown v. Board ofEducation, p. 8. </p> <p>8.Leflar, p. 2. </p> <p>9.Milton Finklestein, Jawn A. Sandifer, and Elfreda Wright, Minorities: U.S.A. (New York: Globe Books, 1971). </p> <p>10.Leflar, p. 3; Brown v. Board, pp. 5-7; and Stephan, pp. 11-17. </p> <p>11.Leflar, pp. 3-4. </p> <p>12.Brown v. Board of Education, p. 11. </p> <p>13."Reaction to Supreme Court Decision Calm, Resigned," Southern School News, 3 September 1954, pp. 1-2. </p> <p>14.Robin M. Williams and Margaret W. Ryan, eds., Schools in Transition: Community Experiences in Desegregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954). </p> <p>15.Ibid., pp. 45, 57, 102, 240, 242, and 443. </p> <p>16.Ibid., pp. 40, 80-110. </p> <p>17."Segregation's Summing Up--Living and Evolving Law," Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 13 December 1952, p. 5. </p> <p>18."Background: 8 States Still Holdouts," Southern School News, September 1956, pp. 1-2; "Segregation Still Holding in Deep South; NorthCarolina Cities Exception," Southern School News, September 1957, p. 1; and W. D. Workman, Jr., "The Deep South," in Shoemaker, p. 89. </p> <p>19.Williams and Ryan, op cit. </p> <p>20.Workman, p. 89. </p> <p>21.Robert L. Crain et al., The Politics of School Desegregation: Comparative Case Studies of Community Structure and Policy-Making (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1968); "Chattanooga Story--What Happened?," Southern School News, June 1956, pp. 6-7; "Reaction to Supreme..."; Jeffrey A. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation: The Metropolitan Remedy in Delaware (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); and Ray Rist, Desegregated Schools: Appraisals of the American Experience (New York: Academic Press, 1979). </p> <p>22.Lino A. Gragila, "From Prohibiting Segregation to Requiring Integration," in Stephan and Feagin, pp. 69-96. </p> <p>23.Sam Ervin, Jr., "The Case for Segregation," Look, 3 April 1956, pp. 32-33. </p> <p>24."Mississippi:Only 1/3 of Counties Complied with Equalization Plan," Southern School News, July 1956, pp. 1, 12. </p> <p>25.Forrest R. White, Pride and Prejudice: School Desegregation and Urban Renewal in Norfolk, 1950-1959 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1991). </p> <p>26.Workman, p. 93. </p> <p>27."Reaction to Supreme...." </p> <p>28."D.C.:Trouble of Anacostia High Reflects Climate ofChange," Southern School News, 4 November 1954, p. 4. </p> <p>29."Virginia Court Strikes Down Enforced Segregation in State Park," Southern School News, 7 April 1955, p. 14. </p> <p>30."Mississippi...." </p> <p>31."Arkansas:School Building Plans Delayed Pending Court's Decision," Southern School News, 1 December 1954, p. 4. </p> <p>32."Segregation Decision Curbs School Construction," Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 13 October 1954, p. 6. </p> <p>33."Blacks Push for 'Equal Facilities' Instead of Integration," Southern School News, 6 January 1955, p. 12; James W. Ely, Jr., The Crisis ofConservative Virginia:The Byrd Organization and the Politics ofMassive Resistance (Knoxville:University ofTennessee Press, 1976), p. 31; and Williams and Ryan, p. 237. </p> <p>34."Leaders Blame Racial Communications Problems onPressure to Integrate," Southern School News, January 1955, p. 7. </p> <p>35."Chattanooga Story...." </p> <p>36.Workman, p. 97. </p> <p>37."Virginia Court...." </p> <p>38.Patrick E. McCauley, "Be It Enacted," in Shoemaker, p. 132. </p> <p>39.Stephan, p. 12. </p> <p>40."'Background' Power to Assign Pupils Is Studied in 7 States," Southern School News, February 1957, p. 1. </p> <p>41."Report of the Subcommittee on Zoning," New York Board of Education, 14 December 1956, reprinted in Race Relations Law Reporter, October 1956, p. 847. </p> <p>42.Williams and Ryan, p. 57. </p> <p>43."Virginia:Charlottesville Divides Itself into 6 School Zones," Southern School News, September 1958, p. 6. </p> <p>44.Shannon Marguerite Henry v. Walter Godsell, et al., U.S. District Court, Michigan, 12 August 1958, No. 14,769, reprinted in Race Relations Law Reporter, October 1958, pp. 914-16. </p> <p>45.Ely, pp. 36, 134. </p> <p>46.White, pp. 235, 264. </p> <p>47."Virginia:Newport News Board Turns School Over to Negroes Rather Than Integrate," Southern School News, October 1955, p. 6. </p> <p>48.White, pp. 235, 265. </p> <p>49."3 North Carolina Cities Assign 12 Negroes toPreviously White Schools," Southern School News, August 1957, p. 3. </p> <p>50."Trends:Judge John J. Parker in Briggs v. Elliot," Southern School News, August 1956, p. 1. </p> <p>51."Virginia:Norfolk Board Votes 'Approval inPrinciple' of Integration," Southern School News, 6 July 1955, p. 10. </p> <p>52.Robert C. Weaver, "The Urban Complex," in Jewel Bellush and Murray Hausknecht, eds., Urban Renewal: People, Politics, and Planning (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 94. </p> <p>53.White, op. cit. </p> <p>54.Charles V. Willie and Susan L. Greenblatt, Community Politics and Educational Change: Ten School Systems Under Court Order (New York: Longman, 1981), p. 189. </p> <p>55.Crain et al., pp. 15, 72-73. </p> <p>56."Virginia:Students inClosed Schools:Where Are TheyNow?," Southern School News, January 1959, p. 9. </p> <p>57.Willie and Greenblatt, pp. 231-32. </p> <p>58.Gary Orfield, "Ghettoization and Its Alternatives," in Paul E. Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), pp. 161-96; and Karl Taueber, "Residence and Race: 1619 to 2019," in Winston A. Van Horne, ed., Race: Twentieth Century Dilemmas--Twenty-First Century Prognoses (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin, 1989), pp. 229-51. </p> <p>59.Heywood, et al. v. Public Housing Administration, 135 F. Supp. 217, reprinted in Race Relations Law Reporter, April 1956, p. 347.K </p> <p>ILLUSTRATIONS </p> <aug> <p>By Forrest R. White </p> </aug> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: 'Brown' Revisited. – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22White%2C+Forrest+R%2E%22">White, Forrest R.</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Phi+Delta+Kappan%22"><i>Phi Delta Kappan</i></searchLink>. Sep 1994 76(1):12-20. – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: N – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 9 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 1994 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Reports - Evaluative<br />Journal Articles – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22De+Facto+Segregation%22">De Facto Segregation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Desegregation+Effects%22">Desegregation Effects</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+History%22">Educational History</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Elementary+Secondary+Education%22">Elementary Secondary Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Racial+Discrimination%22">Racial Discrimination</searchLink> – Name: SubjectThesaurus Label: Laws, Policies and Program Identifiers Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SU" term="%22Brown+v+Board+of+Education%22">Brown v Board of Education</searchLink> – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0031-7217 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: The 1954 "Brown" decision and its 1955 enforcement decree were merely keystone events in a decade-long effort to replace South's elaborate system of legal segregation with type of de facto segregation found in northern, western, and midwestern cities resulting from well-defined racial barriers between neighborhoods. The traditional histories have largely ignored the back-room, southern planning sessions to forestall desegregation. (MLH) – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 1995 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ489358 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 9 StartPage: 12 Subjects: – SubjectFull: De Facto Segregation Type: general – SubjectFull: Desegregation Effects Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational History Type: general – SubjectFull: Elementary Secondary Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Racial Discrimination Type: general – SubjectFull: Brown v Board of Education Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: 'Brown' Revisited. Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: White, Forrest R. IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 1994 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0031-7217 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 76 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: Phi Delta Kappan Type: main |
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