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Brown vs Board of Education is a case name given to five separate court cases heard by the Supreme Court in 1952. All facts in the different court cases were different, but the main issue stood clear, segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. After hearing Marshall's arguments and not coming to a decision by June 1953, the court reheated the case in December 1953 in which case all justices came together and supported a unanimous decision declaring the concept separate but equal in public schools was unconstitutional.

Because of the outcome of this court case, we now have schools in which anyone can attend regardless of the color of their skin.

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The Plessy Decision

Although the Declaration of Independence stated that "All men are created equal," due to the institution of slavery, this statement was not to be grounded in law in the United States until after the Civil War (and, arguably, not completely fulfilled for many years thereafter). In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and finally put an end to slavery. Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by stating, among other things, that no state shall deprive anyone of either "due process of law" or of the "equal protection of the law." Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) further strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by prohibiting states from denying anyone the right to vote due to race.

Despite these Amendments, African Americans were often treated differently than whites in many parts of the country, especially in the South. In fact, many state legislatures enacted laws that led to the legally mandated segregation of the races. In other words, the laws of many states decreed that blacks and whites could not use the same public facilities, ride the same buses, attend the same schools, etc. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws. Although many people felt that these laws were unjust, it was not until the 1890s that they were directly challenged in court. In 1892, an African-American man named Homer Plessy refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by Louisiana state law. For this action he was arrested. Plessy, contending that the Louisiana law separating blacks from whites on trains violated the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, decided to fight his arrest in court. By 1896, his case had made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. By a vote of 8-1, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing the majority opinion, stated that:

"The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to endorse social, as distinguished from political, equality. . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."

The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshal Harlan, interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment another way, stated, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Justice Harlan's dissent would become a rallying cry for those in later generations that wished to declare segregation unconstitutional.

Sadly, as a result of the Plessy decision, in the early twentieth century the Supreme Court continued to uphold the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination. In the case of Cumming v. Richmond (Ga.) County Board of Education (1899), for instance, the Court refused to issue an injunction preventing a school board from spending tax money on a white high school when the same school board voted to close down a black high school for financial reasons. Moreover, in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), the Court upheld a school's decision to bar a person of Chinese descent from a "white" school.

The Road to Brown

(Note: Some of the case information is from Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford University Press; New York, 2001.)

Early Cases

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy and similar cases, many people continued to press for the abolition of Jim Crow and other racially discriminatory laws. One particular organization that fought for racial equality was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded in 1909. For about the first 20 years of its existence, it tried to persuade Congress and other legislative bodies to enact laws that would protect African Americans from lynchings and other racist actions. Beginning in the 1930s, though, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund began to turn to the courts to try to make progress in overcoming legally sanctioned discrimination. From 1935 to 1938, the legal arm of the NAACP was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston, together with Thurgood Marshall, devised a strategy to attack Jim Crow laws by striking at them where they were perhaps weakest-in the field of education. Although Marshall played a crucial role in all of the cases listed below, Houston was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund while Murray v. Maryland and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada were decided. After Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall became head of the Fund and used it to argue the cases of Sweat v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education.

Pearson v. Murray (Md. 1936)

Disappointed that the University of Maryland School of Law was rejecting black applicants solely because of their race, beginning in 1933 Thurgood Marshall (who was himself rejected from this law school because of its racial acceptance policies) decided to challenge this practice in the Maryland court system. Before a Baltimore City Court in 1935, Marshall argued that Donald Gaines Murray was just as qualified as white applicants to attend the University of Maryland's School of Law and that it was solely due to his race that he was rejected. Furthermore, he argued that since the "black" law schools which Murray would otherwise have to attend were nowhere near the same academic caliber as the University's law school, the University was violating the principle of "separate but equal." Moreover, Marshall argued that the disparities between the "white" and "black" law schools were so great that the only remedy would be to allow students like Murray to attend the University's law school. The Baltimore City Court agreed and the University then appealed to the Maryland Court of Appeals. In 1936, the Court of Appeals also ruled in favor of Murray and ordered the law school to admit him. Two years later, Murray graduated.

Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938)

Beginning in 1936, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund decided to take on the case of Lloyd Gaines, a graduate student of Lincoln University (an all-black college) who applied to the University of Missouri Law School but was denied because of his race. The State of Missouri gave Gaines the option of either attending an all-black law school that it would build (Missouri did not have any all-black law schools at this time) or having Missouri help to pay for him to attend a law school in a neighboring state. Gaines rejected both of these options, and, employing the services of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he decided to sue the state in order to attend the University of Missouri's law school. By 1938, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and, in December of that year, the Court sided with him. The six-member majority stated that since a "black" law school did not currently exist in the State of Missouri, the "equal protection clause" required the state to provide, within its boundaries, a legal education for Gaines. In other words, since the state provided legal education for white students, it could not send black students, like Gaines, to school in another state.

Sweat v. Painter (1950)

Encouraged by their victory in Gaines' case, the NAACP continued to attack legally sanctioned racial discrimination in higher education. In 1946, an African American man named Heman Sweat applied to the University of Texas' "white" law school. Hoping that it would not have to admit Sweat to the "white" law school if a "black" school already existed, elsewhere on the University's campus, the state hastily set up an underfunded "black" law school. At this point, Sweat employed the services of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and sued to be admitted to the University's "white" law school. He argued that the education that he was receiving in the "black" law school was not of the same academic caliber as the education that he would be receiving if he attended the "white" law school. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950, the Court unanimously agreed with him, citing as its reason the blatant inequalities between the University's law school (the school for whites) and the hastily erected school for blacks. In other words, the "black" law school was "separate," but not "equal." Like the Murray case, the Court found the only appropriate remedy for this situation was to admit Sweat to the University's law school.

McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education (1950)

In 1949, the University of Oklahoma admitted George McLaurin, an African American, to its doctoral program. However, it required him to sit apart from the rest of his class, eat at a separate time and table from white students, etc. McLaurin, stating that these actions were both unusual and resulting in adverse effects on his academic pursuits, sued to put an end to these practices. McLaurin employed Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to argue his case, a case which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an opinion delivered on the same day as the decision in Sweat, the Court stated that the University's actions concerning McLaurin were adversely affecting his ability to learn and ordered that they cease immediately.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955)

The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Bolling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools. Once again, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund handled these cases.

Although it acknowledged some of the plaintiffs'/plaintiffs claims, a three-judge panel at the U.S. District Court that heard the cases ruled in favor of the school boards. The plaintiffs then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the cases came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court consolidated all five cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall personally argued the case before the Court. Although he raised a variety of legal issues on appeal, the most common one was that separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, and thus violate the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, relying on sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientist Kenneth Clark, and other data, he also argued that segregated school systems had a tendency to make black children feel inferior to white children, and thus such a system should not be legally permissible.

Meeting to decide the case, the Justices of the Supreme Court realized that they were deeply divided over the issues raised. While most wanted to reverse Plessy and declare segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, they had various reasons for doing so. Unable to come to a solution by June 1953 (the end of the Court's 1952-1953 term), the Court decided to rehear the case in December 1953. During the intervening months, however, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died and was replaced by Gov. Earl Warren of California. After the case was reheard in 1953, Chief Justice Warren was able to do something that his predecessor had not-i.e. bring all of the Justices to agree to support a unanimous decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On May 14, 1954, he delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . ."

Expecting opposition to its ruling, especially in the southern states, the Supreme Court did not immediately try to give direction for the implementation of its ruling. Rather, it asked the attorney generals of all states with laws permitting segregation in their public schools to submit plans for how to proceed with desegregation. After still more hearings before the Court concerning the matter of desegregation, on May 31, 1955, the Justices handed down a plan for how it was to proceed; desegregation was to proceed with "all deliberate speed." Although it would be many years before all segregated school systems were to be desegregated, Brown and Brown II (as the Courts plan for how to desegregate schools came to be called) were responsible for getting the process underway.

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History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment

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The Plessy Decision Although the Declaration of Independence stated that "All men are created equal," due to the institution of slavery, this statement was not to be grounded in law in the United States until after the Civil War (and, arguably, not completely fulfilled for many years thereafter).

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Improvement After Brown vs Board of Education

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Improvement After Brown vs Board of Education

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Brown vs Board of Education started because people were upset with the injustice of the nation due to the separation of races in schools, meaning black kids were forced to go to different schools then white kids.

After the success of Brown vs Board of Education, the nation saw a transformed America.

The legal victory in Brown did not transform the country overnight, and much work still remains to this day. The decision gave hope to millions of American's by permanently discrediting the legal rationale underpinning the racial caste system that had been endorsed or accepted by governments at all levels since the end of the 19th century.

Now, schools are not segregated and blacks are free to attend the same school as whites no matter where in the country.

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NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

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A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

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Brown v. Board of Education Celebrating the 67th Anniversary of LDF's Seminal Case May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history.

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School Segregation worse in 2024 than the 1980's

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School Segregation worse in 2024 than the 1980's

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70 years ago the court decided on Brown vs Board of Education after the people saw segregation in the country's school system and decided to put an end to it. But students are still divided by their race and socioeconomic status and its gotten worse over the last 3 years.

Research shows that 'racial segregation in the country's 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64% since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50% since 1991." (Cineas Fabiola Vox.com)

Segregation is not increasing because of shifting demographics, in most large districts, housing segregation and racial economic inequality declined. Tackling the issue will mean taking an approach that voluntary integration programs, socioeconomic-based student assignment policies, and choosing policies that affirmatively promote integration.

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Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the "separate but equal" schools for racial minorities were inherently unequal and unconstitutional.

But so many years after the watershed ruling, new research confirms a startling trend: School segregation has been getting steadily worse over the last three decades.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country's 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991.

The study primarily focused on white-Black segregation, the groups that the Brown decision addressed, but found that white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation both also more than doubled since the late 1980s in the large school districts.

Why is history reversing itself?

Residential segregation, which researchers have historically identified as the root cause, isn't the chief driver, according to the new study. The increased segregation also isn't due to shifting demographics nationwide, as the country becomes less white. In most of the large districts that the researchers examined, housing segregation and racial economic inequality declined.

Instead, they cited two policy choices America has made: increasing school choice options and ending court oversight of integration efforts.

"When we switched from a commitment to integration and equity to school choice, it's not terribly surprising that we see rising school segregation," said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC and one of the report's authors. "We've abdicated our responsibility to integration, and unfettered choice does not magically lead to integration."

And now, the steady increase means that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in higher-poverty schools with fewer resources, a trend that worsens academic and life outcomes.

School choice, namely charter schools, has expanded

School choice, the programs and policies that let families use public funding to access alternatives to traditional public schools, has grown in the past few decades. That's particularly true of the charter school sector, which creates publicly funded schools that have greater flexibility than traditional public schools due to "charter" agreements with states. Some of the first charter schools were introduced in the 1990s to create alternative learning environments, with their own curricula and discipline policies, for example.

Charters now serve 3.7 million students in 8,000 schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. During the 2021-22 school year, they enrolled 7.4 percent of all public school students.

That might not seem like that many students - but it's less how many are enrolling, and more who is.

The study supports the idea that parents, particularly white parents, have enrolled their children in charter schools that are majority white. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, white parents have opted out of big urban district schools. There's generally more segregation both within the charter sector and between charter and traditional public schools.

"We do see that as the charter sector expands, the places where it expanded fastest from the late '90s to today tend to be places where segregation grew the most even after we take into account lots of other things that were going on," said Sean Reardon, the faculty director of Stanford's Educational Opportunity Project that produced the report and a new " Segregation Explorer " tool.

It's not just white families driving the change: Some charters explicitly market themselves to families of certain racial or ethnic communities or neighborhoods, which has helped increase segregation too.

As school choice programs were expanding, another policy that helped integrate schools was ending.

Court oversight has vanished

When Brown was decided in 1954, the Court didn't immediately require school districts to desegregate.

It wasn't until the Supreme Court's 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that schools were mandated to develop plans to dismantle their segregated enrollment systems. The decision introduced new criteria courts could use to evaluate schools' compliance - such as the quality of a school's physical resources and amenities (think: the type of extracurricular activities offered or the kind of transportation they provide all students, the number of teachers, etc.) or the ratio of Black and white students and teachers.

The orders had a huge impact, but by the early '90s, districts were released from the mandates after a series of cases that gave districts local control.

The new research shows that within five to eight years of districts being released from mandates, segregation increased. Since 1991, about two-thirds of school districts that were required to meet court desegregation mandates were removed from court oversight.

Why this matters - and how to reverse school segregation

Brown was supposed to lead to long-lasting desegregation. Though school segregation in most school districts is much lower than it was 60 years ago, it's higher than it was 30 years ago. And today's divisions are enough to concentrate Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools.

And that in turn "drives a lot of inequality and disparate outcomes that we see," said Owens. "It's not that sitting next to a kid of a particular racial group is on its face beneficial. It's that resources from home, social resources, and political resources in our society are linked to race."

Achievement gaps are larger and grow faster as kids progress through school in more segregated districts than more integrated districts, Reardon said, adding that integration efforts tailored to a specific town's issues have led to very large improvements in educational and life outcomes for students of color. Research has also shown that desegregation doesn't worsen outcomes for white students.

Given that housing segregation helped create school segregation in the first place, tackling this issue will mean taking a "a multi-sector approach because the education system alone can't address it," Reardon said.

Barring that, there are a few solutions to at least help us counteract the slides of the last three decades. Everything from voluntary integration programs to socioeconomic-based student assignment policies - and if we're committed to school choice policies, choosing ones that affirmatively promote integration.
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Seventy years after the Brown decision, many students are divided by their race and socioeconomic status.

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What is Hyper-segregation and why is it happening?

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What is Hyper-segregation and why is it happening?

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Hypersegregation is when a race or ethnic group is highly segregated in multiple ways no matter how segregation is conceptualized or measured.

There was hyper segregation before Brown vs Board of Education and not just in schools. Although Brown vs Board of Education overturned segregation, that did not completely end hyper segregation.

In Clark's article "70 years after Brown, too many U.S. schools remain hypersegregated and unequal", she explains that "40% of America's more than 1,700 school districts are hyper segregated, where at least three quarters of students are from low income households." (Shannon Paige Clark chalkbeat.org)

When hypersegregation takes place, it affects students and make it harder for them to learn because they are denied the resources they need to succeed.

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I was 21 when I started teaching at Hope-Hill Elementary School in Atlanta. I had big dreams and bold ideas - some held, others fettered as the toll of teaching in majority Black schools suffering from resource deprivation took hold.

My first year was complicated by the fact that C.W. Hill Elementary closed, or merged with John Hope Elementary, depending on whom you ask. And in an effort to make the devastating change more palatable, John Hope Elementary School became Hope-Hill Elementary School.

This was my introduction to austerity measures, or the practices in school districts that justified slashing resources, slimming budgets, and closing schools, which are often in working-class Black communities.

Hope-Hill was led by Black women and almost all of my colleagues were Black, as am I. We did the best with what we had, and many of us used our own resources to make our classrooms special. At the end of that year, I felt grateful to be in a community that felt like home, and I was happy I survived the first year of teaching in a system that set me and my colleagues up to fail.

Midway through my summer break, I received a surprise phone call inviting me to interview for a new teaching position. A neighboring school principal informed me that my name was listed as eligible for hire, which meant I was surplused, unbeknownst to me. In other words, I was the last one hired and the first one fired because the enrollment numbers at Hope-Hill did not justify the existing number of teachers - another austerity measure.

Two years, two schools. New grade, new curriculum. I was already disillusioned and not sure I had the wherewithal to start over so soon. In fact, research shows that Black teachers leave the teaching profession more than educators in other racial groups, commonly citing burnout, disrespect, and racism.

I stuck it out. I was a brand new teacher for the second year in a row.

One day, I read a book about Ruby Bridges to my third grade students. I began to explain that schools were no longer segregated, in part because of the courage of children like Ruby, who in 1960 became the first Black student to attend a Louisiana school that had previously been all white.

"Did you say segregation ended, Ms. Paige?"

Tatianna's question stopped me mid-sentence.

I thought to myself: I did, but if you look around this classroom and school, you would not know.

"Yes," I told Tatianna."There are no longer laws, or rules, that forbid Black people like you and I from going to schools with white children."

Then Tyreik chimed in, "So where all the white people?"

I replied, "That's a good question. It's tricky. Many of the neighborhoods we live in are still segregated even though the law does not say they have to be that way. And since we live in segregated neighborhoods, many schools still look like they did when the law said schools must be segregated because most children go to school near their houses."

... research shows that Black teachers leave the teaching profession more than any other racial group, commonly citing burnout, disrespect, and racism.

If they were older, I would have told them about anti-Blackness and redlining and the ways unjust policies have been used to maintain de facto segregation.

Today, schools remain largely segregated by race and class, and I often think back to my first two years in the classroom, starting in 2009. All but three of my students were Black, and most of my colleagues were Black, too. We lacked material resources, but we had a lot of heart.

My teaching and coaching experiences in schools that were highly segregated by race and class fuels my passion for researching hypersegregated schools, places that 70 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling are still separate and unequal.

According to the Center for American Progress, some 40% of America's more than 1,700 school districts are hypersegregated, where at least three-quarters of students are from low-income households. Hypersegregated schools tend to get by on the bare minimum. Facilities may be inadequate, and the consequences of racial segregation and concentrated poverty make it harder to learn and even harder to thrive.

In my research, I focus on hypersegregated school communities where people lack the resources they need. I call this resource deprivation because those in power make decisions that deny necessary resources.

A CBS News investigation found that majority Black school districts have less money, and the students suffer as a result. School funding disparities exist across states, districts, and schools; high-poverty districts with the most students of color receive less funding per student, on average. EdBuild, which parsed school funding systems, determined that, nationwide, predominantly white school districts get $23 billion more than predominantly non-white districts, despite serving a similar number of children. This is resource deprivation.

Hypersegregation fuels inequity, and despite the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 70 years ago, the resource deprivation that existed in 1954 remains for far too many Black children who are relegated to underfunded schools.

There are miracle workers in many of these school communities. But the weight of fighting a separate and unequal system can diminish the hopes and dreams of even the most idealistic people - educators and students alike.
Shannon Paige Clark, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. She researches educational policies and family engagement in school.

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Shannon Paige Clark taught at hypersegregated schools. Now she researches those high-poverty schools, which often lack essential resources.

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Before the decision of Brown vs Board of Education came to be, schools were segregated, schools for whites and schools for blacks.

Segregation academies came to be after the ruling of Brown vs Board of Education where "many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children and are still operating" (Jennifer Berry Hawes prepublication.org)

These academies are detrimental to society and go against everything Brown vs Board of Education fought for.

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Credit: Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Stanford University Library

Seventy years after Brown v. Board, Black and white residents, in Camden, Alabama, say they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren't sure how to make it happen.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road's name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population - a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a " segregation academy " due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It's down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Down the road, the county's public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High's building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South's massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama's 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified - about a dozen - are still vastly white, even though the region's population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

"You're dividing money you don't have in half," said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It's part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast - where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama's Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of "Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement." Even the language used - framing the movement as parents' right to "freedom" and "private school choice" - was the same then as it is now.

"I cannot see how there will be any difference," Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama's new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. "Of course, neither of these statements are true," he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren't sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn't met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they hadn't worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. "I caught word that she said she missed me too," she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. "I definitely would have been a theater kid," she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: "There's so many different cultures, so many people to meet."

Jazmyne's grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn't think it's the cause of the ongoing divisions.

"Nobody around here is really racist," she said. "We just haven't come together. We've been doing our own thing all the time."

Roots of Division

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman's Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father's college classmates, spoke at commencement in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts - landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school's church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county's racial line that day.

Credit: Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: "Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I'm gonna kill you." When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who'd come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation academy, which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open - and called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state's legislature approved $3.75 million - worth about $36 million today - to fund tuition grants that paid for students "to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes," the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which "enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South's history," Suitts wrote in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden's local newspaper reported, "Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week." The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.

"The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill," the article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: "Private School Plan Shaping Up." The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies weren't racist. Publicly, they cited "choice," "freedom" and higher-quality (often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people's homes, churches or vacant buildings. Researchers who visited some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were "dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment."

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was "generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area," the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy's former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew's classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children - just as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.

"It is really heartbreaking," she said.

Tools of Resistance

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master's thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.

Sheffield didn't go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor's degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on Antioch Baptist Church, where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy's building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn't they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy's Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy's academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don't have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn't say it was because the students there are Black, "but that was the sense I got," Sheffield said.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents' friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, state records indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found.

Wilcox Academy's principal did not respond to ProPublica's multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy's impact on local school segregation, why it doesn't participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race - the comfort of their own, discomfort with another - even if they didn't recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master's degree. (She's now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master's thesis, she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly "a tidal wave" of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties - including Wilcox - was more than 90% Black.

"These segregation academies proved to be white resisters' most successful tool of resistance," Sheffield wrote.

The Persistence of Division

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don't. It's been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many enslaved laborers that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don't often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. "Will we ever know each other as people here?" he asked. "I'm not sure."

He noted that it's difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.

"We don't trust one another because we are so separate," he said.

Two years ago, some of the county's mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board's request to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews' nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.

People who don't send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.

"If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways - and trust more," Saulsberry said. "And we won't continue to die as a county."

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt Treasures, where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school's art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn't easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?

"It's not as cut-and-dried," she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy's religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. "You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school," she said. "It's become more about school pride or tradition."

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There's almost always fundraising underway. The academy's annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. "We're ready for coming together," Law said. "How do we do that?"

Crossing the Broken Bridge

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County - though not in the public schools.

Alabama's new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama's existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The new program, which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden's public schools and describes the "broken bridge" between the two communities. He never imagined that he'd one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.

"We are still set in those old-time ways," he said. "But God has made it better, and it's time to let it go."

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he's told the staff, "We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school."

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn't expect many to apply regardless. "I'm not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there."

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district's standardized test results could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals - which few area academies offer.

"We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side," Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: "They'll be out to recruit now."

When Woods coaches the academy's teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. "A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school," he said. "But they just couldn't afford it." Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would "the white school" treat their children?

How We Counted Segregation Academies

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted existing research using data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Private School Universe Survey to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation - many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools.

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Seventy years after Brown v. Board, Black and white residents, in Camden, Alabama, say they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren't sure how to make it happen.

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https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/history-brown-v-board-education-re-enactment

https://www.vox.com/24156492/school-segregation-increasing-brown-board-of-education

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/05/17/marking-brown-v-board-anniversary-many-schools-are-hypersegregated-and-unequal/

https://www.propublica.org/article/camden-alabama-segregated-schools-brown-v-board

https://www.axios.com/local/raleigh/2024/05/17/brown-decision-north-carolina-schools-segregated-ucla-study

http://law.stanford.edu/stanford-legal-podcast/the-legacy-of-brown-v-boe-success-or-failure/

https://theconversation.com/how-black-teachers-lost-when-civil-rights-won-in-brown-v-board-229687

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NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

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A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

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Brown v. Board of Education Celebrating the 67th Anniversary of LDF's Seminal Case May 17, 1954 marks a defining moment in the history of the United States. On that day, the Supreme Court declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and handed LDF the most celebrated victory in its storied history.

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North Carolina Public Schools are Segregated AGAIN 

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North Carolina Public Schools are Segregated AGAIN 

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North Carolina was a model for desegregated schools in the 80's and 90's but various court decisions and policies have led to a reversion in the 21st century.

According to Soloff's article "North Carolina schools are segregated while the states become more diverse, "In North Carolina, one in four Black students and nearly one in five Hispanic students now attend 'an intensely segregated school of color' defined as schools that are 90-100% nonwhite students." (Katie Peralta Soloff axios.com)

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Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education ruled it unconstitutional to separate schools on the basis of race, schools in North Carolina have become segregated once again even as the state has become more racially diverse.

Why it matters: North Carolina's public schools were a model for desegregation in the 1980s and 1990s, but various court decisions and policies have led to a 21st-century reversion.

The effects on communities are widespread, experts say, because well-integrated schools lead to beneficial academic and personal outcomes for students from all backgrounds.

By the numbers: In North Carolina, one in four Black students and nearly one in five Hispanic students now attend "an intensely segregated school of color," defined as schools that are 90-100% nonwhite students.

That's according to a new study from the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA in collaboration with researchers at N.C. State.

In the late 1980s, less than 5% of Black students attended highly segregated schools, per the study.

Within intensely segregated schools of color, in 2021 82.6% of the students were recipients of free and reduced-priced lunch, indicating a "double segregation" of students by race and poverty, per the study.

Data: Stanford Education Data Archive; Note: Index ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 denotes no segregation (all schools have identical proportions of Black and white students) while 1 denotes complete segregation (no Black student attends a school with any white students, and vice versa); Map: Axios Visuals

The big picture: Jennifer Ayscue, an assistant professor of education at N.C. State University and one of the report's co-authors, notes three major causes of re-segregation of public schools in North Carolina:

A shifting legal landscape, meaning many school districts, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, have been released from mandatory school desegregation plans.

The expansion of school choice without civil rights protections, which in North Carolina means the expansion of charter schools and voucher programs.

Residential segregation, meaning districts have student assignment policies and boundaries drawn in ways that facilitate more segregation.

Zoom out: What's happening in North Carolina mirrors a national trend. In 1988, about 7.4% of the nation's schools were intensely segregated, Axios' Russell Contreras reported, citing a UCLA analysis of federal data.

By 2021, that number was about 20%.

What they're saying: "Unfortunately, the trend we see in North Carolina is consistent with what's going on across the nation," Ayscue tells Axios. "What we've seen historically is when school districts aren't intentional about focusing on desegregation, they tend to become more segregated."

The other side: Debbie Veney of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said neighborhood schools and charters are not causing racial segregation, but simply serving the students who appear at their doorsteps.

"The researchers might instead focus on why white families move from neighborhoods and pull their children out of schools when too many Black, Brown or low-income kids start showing up. When we try to integrate, they leave."

Flashback: The landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision of 1971 mandated Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to integrate.

The ruling found that busing was an appropriate means to achieve integration, so that's what the district began to do.

"The peak of desegregation for Black students across the U.S. was in 1988 and we saw a lot of that progress was in the South," Ayscue says.

Between the lines: Unlike CMS, Wake County was never bound by court-ordered desegregation. The consolidation of Wake County and Raleigh City Schools in the 1970s helped integrate schools, as did busing Black children students to white schools, WUNC reported.

But like other districts, Wake County schools have also re-segregated.

The Wake County Board of Education has committed in recent years to voluntarily reintegrating schools through efforts like exploring equitable distribution of funds, so students across all schools have access to quality resources regardless of PTAs.

The bottom line: Segregated schools are associated with lower academic outcomes, less qualified teachers, higher teacher and student turnover, and higher dropout rates, among other harms, Ayscue says.

Conversely, integrated schools are associated with higher academic achievement, lower dropout rates, improved critical thinking and reduction in prejudices. And long term, Ayscue adds, students tend to have better-paying jobs, lower incarceration rates and better health outcomes.

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North Carolina schools have become segregated while the state's become more diverse

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N.C. schools were once a model for desegregation.

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Did Brown vs Board of Education Succeed or Fail?

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Did Brown vs Board of Education Succeed or Fail?

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All court cases have one outcome: they either fail or succeed. In this case, the people saw the injustice in school systems, in which they were segregated and blacks and whites could not go to the same school. Brown vs Board of Education succeed and ended segregation in schools.

Although it succeed in court that doesn't mean it is fully success across the nation.

In a podcast with Rich and Pam, Rick Banks discusses whether he feels Brown vs Board failed or succeeded.

Ford feels as though housing desegregation was the least successful.

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Rick Banks: The Court in Brown could have, rather than relying solely on the Equal Protection Clause, it could have articulated a right to education of some sort, right? That there's a federal constitutional right to an education of some particular quality, but the Court declined to do that.

Rich Ford: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day.

I'm Rich Ford, with Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way, you'll have access to all of our new episodes as soon as they're available. Well, it's the 70th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. The landmark case that began the desegregation of public schools in the United States and the end of Jim Crow segregation, and we have the perfect guest to talk about the legacy of Brown and where we are today, our colleague, Rick Banks, who's written an important and fascinating essay about the legacy of Brown versus Board of Education. Of course, one of the most celebrated cases in the history of the Supreme Court and a decision that many people credit as one of the impetuses for the modern civil rights movement, but Professor Banks suggests that its legacy today is perhaps a bit less impressive than many of you might suspect. Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Banks: It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Rich Ford: So Rick, tell us about Brown versus Board of Education and why it is you think that its legacy is less impressive than some people might believe today in 2024.

That's a big change, but the other thing that we might expect Brown to have transformed is the primary and secondary schools in the United States, and in particular, we might expect Brown to have created better opportunity for the Black children and the other minorities and other disadvantaged students who were, and on that score, Brown has not been nearly as effective.

Rich Ford: So, tell us a little more about that, Rick. Brown hasn't been as effective in providing opportunities for those children. Can you give us some examples or some statistics about that?

Rick Banks: Well, I think that the important thing to start with is the decision in Brown itself.

This is monumentally important, but then the question is always what happens after the decision? What actually happens on the ground in the multiple cases, for example, that were a part of Brown? Sometimes, when I've taught this, I would bring a friend in who actually is a Stanford professor who's African American, who grew up in the South, and he will talk about being in the very first class of students who had the opportunity to go to a desegregated school, and then the students will ask, well, what year was that? And he'll say, oh, that 1960s, and they'll say the 1960s? I thought Brown was decided in 1954, but the reality was that there was virtually no desegregation for ten full years until the Civil Rights Acts were passed in 1964, and that's when the first efforts to desegregation began in earnest, so we had ten years where virtually nothing happened. Then we had a period, from the 60s through the 70s, where we did have some desegregation, and I think it's fair to say that now or since the 80s, perhaps, we've been in retreat in terms of the effort to desegregate the schools.

Pam Karlan: I mean, one thing that has always struck me, and you were kind of alluding to this, is, you know, if you look at the five school systems that were actually at issue in Brown itself, one of them just closed the schools altogether, rather than desegregate them, and Prince Edward County, Virginia just closed its schools entirely, and that era of kind of massive resistance, I mean, you started us off by saying how important Brown was as a signal of everything. It was also the beginning of the modern Supreme Court as an institution that gets a lot of respect out of America, and I feel like they're often kind of living off the fumes of Brown, if you will.

The Supreme Court stood up to that in a way, right, and became sort of the hero in this story, but the irony is that they only became the hero through not actually engaging on the ground with the challenges of trying to create integrated and quality schooling.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, I mean, in 1964, 1.4 percent of black schoolchildren in the South attended a school that had even a single white student in it, right? So, that's ten years after Brown.

Rick Banks: Yeah, and if you look even closer in the years immediately after Brown, we can count in single digits the number of black students who've been permitted to go to schools that had any appreciable number of white students, so that's a checker sort of history at best in terms of desegregation.

Pam Karlan: And yet, Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown for one of the groups of plaintiffs in Brown, he said the pessimistic view, it's going to take ten years to do this, and now here we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of Brown, and we still haven't achieved it.

Rich Ford: Yeah, Rick, I think you and I are roughly the same age, and I know I attended schools that were under court order to desegregate in the late 1970s and 1980s, and that was a period of time in which the schools were getting less segregated as a result of those court orders, so we had that ten years of massive resistance where nothing happened. Then some things did start to happen and so you could imagine why people would have felt optimistic. You know, I think my parents were cautiously optimistic that things were improving on the score, so what happened?

Rick Banks: Wow, that's a big story, and the way I think of it is that the... we have two sets of resources here that are really constraining progress. One set of resources is money, right? The funding for schools and the other set of resources is people, families, and students, and to have effective schools for all, I think we actually do need to try to bring all of those together and not have the funding disparities and not have people segregated based on their income levels and affluence and so forth, but we haven't been able to do that, and the underlying reason, I think, or 1 factor that doesn't get enough attention for why we haven't been able to do that is that we've had an extraordinary growth of economic inequality in the period since Brown. The last half-century, we've seen a starker growth in inequality than any time during our lifetimes, and we've also seen education become ever more important in determining people's outcomes in life, and so, as a result of this, parents have completely changed their strategies compared to, you know, a century ago or 1940 or 1950, and parents have really doubled down on education, both in terms of their time, in terms of their resources, in terms of where they decide to live and all of these factors have, you know, led to schools being less equal across classes and races now than they were 50 years ago.

Pam Karlan: So there are some parents who do have those choices, right? Upper middle-class, middle-class parents have the choice of where to live. Parents who aren't affluent don't really have that choice, and one of the ironies is that the Supreme Court is deciding Brown at exactly the moment that there's this explosion of the suburbs.

There's white flight from inner cities. I mean, one of the examples I use when I teach this stuff is that the places that had the most successful desegregation in the 70s were places like Charlotte, Mecklenburg because they had already consolidated the center city schools in Charlotte with the Mecklenburg County schools, so that you couldn't really live close to Charlotte and not live in the school district that was going to be desegregated and they kind of used pie wedges to get there, but in places where you had, I mean, think about Detroit and what happens in Millican, you have incredibly affluent white suburbs of Detroit, Grosse Pointe and the like, immediately smack up against Detroit, and yet you can't come up with a way of desegregating those schools because of the idea of local control, and that really was the Supreme Court's decision that shut down the ability to have that kind of desegregation in large northern urban areas. I mean, when you look at southern school systems, a lot of those are still desegregated because they only had three schools in the, you know, three high schools in the county, so it was easy to kind of mix students up, but you can't really do that in the north.

Rick Banks: No, that's exactly right, and just to be clear, in the city like Detroit or in Cleveland, where I'm from, there were ways to desegregate the schools, but the impediment was the idea of local control that created a boundary or a barrier, so that we were not legally permitted to do what, frankly, would make a lot of sense from the standpoint of providing education to all the citizens of the state, and that's a, you know, local control is just a stand-in for the ways in which the law and courts have allowed people to segregate themselves and also allowed the resources to be segregated as well.

Pam Karlan: You know, we started off by talking about how the Supreme Court gets the school desegregation process rolling, but if you look at where the Supreme Court later comes down in cases like the Parents Involved case, they stop the desegregation of schools rather than starting it, and maybe you want to say a little bit about cases like Parents Involved.

Rick Banks: Yeah, so, Parents Involved is the case where the Supreme Court held that strict scrutiny should apply to efforts to integrate schools if they take into account individuals' race in doing so, and many people decried Parents Involved as a perversion of Brown and a distortion of the meaning of Brown. Frankly, I don't know if that interpretation is correct, though, because the reality is that Brown v. Board of Education was neither as progressive and anti-subordination-oriented as the people on the Left want, nor was it as colorblind as the people on the Right one want, and the hallmark of the decision is precisely that the decision was extremely narrow. It was extremely narrow, and the most plausible reading is that all it prohibited was the formal segregation of the schools in order to promote Jim Crow. That's the... or taking account of students' race in order to promote Jim Crow.

That's all it prohibited, and efforts to make it more than that on either the Left or the Right, frankly, are, you know, after the fact, interpretations about what people want Brown to mean rather than what the Justices actually wrote, and part of that, one more point, part of the frustrating narrowness of the decision is that the Court spoke about the harm of segregation almost as though it was inadvertent. The Court gave no story or history about what Jim Crow was really about. The reader of the opinion could be forgiven for thinking that the harm was inadvertent. There was no sense that the degradation of Jim Crow was at the core of the law and the core motivation for such laws.

The Court gave none of that history, of course, because the Court wanted a unanimous opinion, but, you know, my view has shifted about the cost and benefits of that trade-off. The Court went for unanimity, but at the cost of having a fuller account of what the actual harm was that was being addressed, and the consequences of that is what we're living with today, frankly, which is that that may Brown vulnerable to being co-opted by people who, you know, some people have said they might not have signed onto Brown initially.

Rick Banks: Yeah, what I tell my students is that Loving is the only case where the Supreme Court has ever used the term white supremacy in a disparaging way, so that's what Loving was, but the Court, of course, had an opportunity to take a case comparable to Loving at the same time as Brown, which it declined to do, right? And the difference there is, of course, you know, the cultural context surrounding the decision. Things changed in ways that, you know, might've seemed unimaginable, frankly, to people living at the time between 1954 and 1967. When you think about the, you know, going from the post World War II era and then going into the civil rights era, Civil Rights Act of '64, Voting Rights Act. We had the Fair Housing Act on the horizon.

That was an extraordinary period of tumult, and, you know, the Court felt able to talk about miscegenation laws in a way it did not feel able to talk about segregated schools in 1954, and part of that, of course, is that miscegenation laws were already on the way out. Countries, I'm sorry, states were already rolling back those laws.

There had been many more states that had them. I think there were 14 by the time Loving was decided. There had been 25 earlier. At the time when Brown was decided, the, you know, evolution of laws regarding school segregation was at a much different point. Segregation was widespread throughout the south. We hadn't begun the process that we had in Loving.

Rich Ford: Yeah, Rick, isn't another reason that undoing de facto school desegregation or segregation, it was a much more complicated and daunting enterprise than getting rid of something like an anti-miscegenation law, so in the... when the efforts to desegregate the schools really got going, you know, and they did get going for a period of time when they were real assertive efforts, but that required a huge administrative apparatus and cooperation with local school districts, and, you know, fairly elaborate consent decrees and money as you mentioned, those were, you know, impediments that the Court didn't face in a case like Loving.

Rick Banks: No, that is very true. You know, Brown required some enforcement, and this is an issue that we've struggled with as a society. You can't have the Court simply make a decision and expect that effective or integrative schooling will result, so one of the challenges that we have to think about as a nation is, you know, how much is racial justice and education worth?

How much is having a good education for all children, irrespective of where they're born and who their parents are, how much is that worth for us? Are we willing to give up some of the local control? Are we willing to give up some of the autonomy that people have to keep their money in their district?

Are we willing to give up some of those things or not? And sadly, I mean, maybe we're not, right? I think that's a mistake, though, because, you know, ultimately, when we have these disparities in education, we all bear the cost of them as a nation, so if we're all going to bear the cost, it would be sensible for us all to pitch in and try to create a solution.

Rich Ford: This reminds me of the case that came down roughly the same period of time as the Millikan case, which limited the remedies to local jurisdictions, and, you know, I will say, the doctrinal justification for limiting those remedies to local jurisdictions is weak, if not non-existent. You know, the plaintiff in the case of Millikan was the state of Michigan, and those local school district boundaries were laws of the state of Michigan, so the idea that it would be limited to Detroit was really quite questionable, but another case that came down was San Antonio versus Rodriguez, which you could almost see is working hand in hand with Milliken to undermine the potential of Brown, and in that case, the Court declined to find that unequaled school funding violated the Constitution, so now, not only do you have racially segregated schools that are allowed to continue under milk, and you've got radical differences in funding that are allowed to continue under the Rodriguez case.

Rich Ford: So, Rick, one of the consequences of the litigation posture around Brown and the way the opinion was crafted is that the primary mechanism for achieving racial equity in the schools has been through desegregation or integration, and it's arguable that there are many people who think that there are other ways to achieve racial equity that perhaps have gotten a short shrift, at least in the legal landscape. What do you think about that?

Rick Banks: Yeah. You're correct. There are efforts that are still focused on integration, and we have lots of activists and lots of lawyers who are out there, and some people work within the government who are trying to create more integrated schools, but then, you also have this other reform wing, which tends to be more conservative, which is trying to promote people quality education often through charter schools or other sorts of private schools or through choice programs using vouchers that are operating completely without regard to integration or desegregation, and, you know, those are reform efforts that are happening throughout the country. Some states are farther ahead than others.

Some of the states that are far ahead, at least according to their proponents, have actually produced better outcomes for poor children and for racial minority children, black and brown children, than other states that don't have as much choice, but so that's the claim. The empirical evidence, to the extent we have it on public schools versus charter schools, is that you can have good schools from either category and poor schools from either category. There's a big range of public schools and there's a big range of charter schools in terms of their effectiveness.

Rich Ford: Another question that people in favor of integration often raise is that integration, at least socioeconomic integration, promotes some positive educational outcomes, arguably in and of itself, so that might be an argument for continuing to push on the integration side.

Rick Banks: Yeah, this is an issue that I was thinking about when I talked about seeing families and students as resources. It is the case that the composition of the school matters for the achievement of the students within the school, so if you have a group of poor students and the class is all poor students, that, frankly, is probably not as good of a learning environment as if you were to have some middle income or even upper-income students mixed into that mix, so we need some diversity, not only in terms of race but also in terms of income and socioeconomic status and parents educational levels.

Those higher-status families can bring all sorts of benefits to educational environments.

Pam Karlan: So, one of the things when you talk about like charter schools and vouchers is that that throws a lot of responsibility back on to the parents of individual school children to think about how to vindicate their kids' rights, and, you know, it leads me to think of comparisons back to some of these stories of, you know, I think about the book Silver Rights, which is about the folks who integrated the one family, the Carter family in Sunflower County, Mississippi, who was willing to put their kids on the line to, you know, to desegregate the schools in this very conservative rural county where the, you know, "the Little Rock Nine," and is it really reform if what we do is we throw the responsibility for seeking good schools back onto individual parents in that way?

Rick Banks: Yeah, I am hesitant to embrace choice as a solution, personally, because when you look at other nations and the nations that have good primary and secondary systems and that do well on these national exams and so forth, they don't rely on choice. They actually have a system that works well for the mass of students.

What we don't have is that system that works well for the mass of students. We have a system that's really riven with ratio and socioeconomic disparities in the opportunities that children have to learn, and so that leaves us in the world of the second best. In the world of the second best, I'm also hesitant to dismiss programs that rely on choice or programs that rely on vouchers or that rely on charter schools because it's really an empirical question as to whether those programs will be better or comparable to the admittedly subpar opportunities that are currently offered through the public system in jurisdictions throughout the country.

Rich Ford: So one of the legacies of Brown has been that for many decades, we put a great deal of focus on the integration of public schools. Now, for reasons that were quite good and understandable, but in today's environment, you seem to be suggesting that we might need a mix of approaches, some of which would potentially involve integrated schools, but others of which might focus more on educational quality choice and what have you, and perhaps we're in a bit of a... we're sort of stymied because people have an almost reflexive reaction to the debate, rather than one that's more cooperative.

Rick Banks: I think that's right that we do need some experimentation, and we need experimentation. We need collection of evidence. We need people to be able to evaluate the evidence with an open mind and to really be pragmatic and solution-oriented, so I think that's all true. I want to be clear, though, that I don't think we should give up on integration because the reality is that we haven't tried it that long, right? We didn't try it at all until the 1960s, and then we tried it for about a decade or so, and then the retreat began, so it's not as though we've tried integration for 40 years, and it didn't work.

That's not true. The question is, can we muster the will to try integration, knowing contrary to what Thurgood Marshall thought, that it's not going to just take another five years or so? It's going to take decades to try to integrate a society given the legacy that we're confronting of slavery and segregation and the inequalities that still exist.

Given all that, integration is a heavy lift. What we need to remind ourselves in that process is that you know, racial justice is not cheap. It costs money. It costs resources. It takes time, and that'll be true whether we go the integration route or if we arrive at integration indirectly by creating schools that are more effective for disadvantaged students so that, over time, they become more fully integrated into society.

Pam Karlan: It strikes me that one of the things that's so difficult about this is, of course, if we had residential integration, if we didn't have amounts of residential segregation, it would be easy to integrate the schools. We could go back to neighborhood schools, and the neighborhood schools be integrated in the way that I bet you every school in the country has, you know, 16 percent people who are left-handed and 84 percent people who are right-handed, just because people are integrated according to which hand they use, so, I mean, some of this is just, it just feels so daunting, even though it's worth remembering that we've desegregated huge parts of society. I mean, you know, you can go to any lunch counter now in America, and you can eat in any restaurant pretty much. The bus, you know, so you think about the cases that came right after Brown, the cases about municipal golf courses, municipal cemeteries, the Montgomery buses, and the like, and those all have been so successful, in a sense. You know, the public accommodations cases that it's just incredibly frustrating that this fundamental piece of what makes for a country hasn't had that same success.

Rick Banks: Yeah, this is, again, immensely frustrating and somewhat tragic that the segregation of schools is very much parasitic upon the segregation of housing, and the segregation of housing is something that, as a nation, we don't have much appetite to undo, and that's true in conservative areas. It's even true in liberal areas like California. People have incentives to try to isolate themselves or retreat to enclaves with people like themselves and keep the resources to themselves, and when that market operates, we're going to have a society that is starkly segregated by class and also somewhat segregated by race. That's not the society we should want.

It's the idea of putting your kid on a bus going across town when you could otherwise send them to a neighborhood school. Resistance to that was, in part, racist, and, in part, of it was understandable.

Rick Banks: Oh, yeah. Part of it was very understandable. The reason I think that our situation is somewhat tragic is that it's actually not a story of kind of the, you know, prototypical racists who are blocking progress.

It's actually a story of impulses that every parent feels. That they want the environment they think is best for their child. They want more resources for their child rather than less, and every parent feels that, and so, but that leads us to a situation where you can have people acting rationally based on goals that are reasonable and impulses that are understandable, but what that leads to is a world that is dramatically segregated, dramatically unequal in our society, and that's where we are. One possibility when I think about the relation between housing segregation in school, desegregation, I do wonder, though, whether there is some possibility for using education to help desegregate housing, because the quality of schools in a district is a powerful determinant of the housing prices in that district, and you can see this in the Bay Area and elsewhere, literally, when you go across a school district line, the housing prices can increase or decrease by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so it, you know, if we could solve the school problem, that also could give us some leverage, maybe, maybe, on the housing problem.

Rich Ford: Well, that's a hopeful note on which to end our fascinating conversation. Thank you very much, Rick. Thanks for joining us today. This is Stanford Legal, and if you're enjoying our show, please leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app and tell a friend. It'll help us to improve, and it'll help us to get new listeners to discover the show.

I'm Rich Ford with Pam Karlan. See you next time.

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The Legacy of Brown v. BOE: Success or Failure? | Stanford Law School

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Rick Banks: The Court in Brown could have, rather than relying solely on the Equal Protection Clause, it could have articulated a right to education of some sort, right? That there's a federal constitutional right to an education of some particular quality, but the Court declined to do that.

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Did Brown vs Board of Education make it harder for Black teachers to succeed? 

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Did Brown vs Board of Education make it harder for Black teachers to succeed? 

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Before Brown vs Board of Education, Black teachers were only allowed to teach to Black students, in Black schools. Now, after Brown vs Board of Education, Black teachers are teaching all students in non segregated schools.

Black teachers support student learning and social and emotional development of children of color in ways that lead to better outcomes. Although, the teacher workforce remains stubbornly white dominated.

The nation faces a massive teacher shortage, but no shortage of potential teachers of colors.

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Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools, stands in the collective national memory as a turning point in America's fight for racial justice. But as the U.S. observes its 70th anniversary, Brown also represents something more somber: It ultimately led to thousands of Black teachers losing their jobs.

Before Brown, Black teachers constituted 35% to 50% of the teacher workforce in segregated states. Today, Black people account for just 6.7% of America's public K-12 teachers, even as Black children make up more than 15% of public school students.

As researchers focused on education policy, teacher diversity, critical research methods and teacher quality, we believe this is an important piece of unfinished business for a country still reckoning with systemic racism. In our view, the best way to fulfill Brown's promise and confront the national teacher shortage is to hire more teachers of color.

How Black teachers' ranks rose and fell

Before Brown, Black children often were excluded from public schools or forced into underfunded and unsafe schools. Rather than accept these conditions, many Black communities pooled limited resources to build private schools of their own, buy curricular materials and hire Black teachers.

Conditions were vastly unequal to those for white children at the time, but the presence of Black teachers provided Black children with deep value and care.

Prior to 1954, there were about 82,000 Black teachers in the United States. A decade later, with hundreds of segregated schools closing, more than 38,000 Black teachers had been fired by white school leaders. As the community-run schools for Black children disappeared following the end of legalized segregation, so too did the Black educators who staffed them.

Brown had mandated integration for students but said nothing of their educators.

The importance of Black teachers

In the decades since, parents, social justice advocates and researchers have documented the importance of teachers of color and pleaded for teacher workforce diversity. They argue that Black teachers support student learning and social and emotional development of children of color in ways that lead to better outcomes.

One study found the presence of Black math teachers increased the likelihood that Black students enroll in rigorous math classes. Another found that Black students taught by at least one Black teacher from kindergarten through third grade were 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to attend college than same-race peers who did not have a Black teacher.

Still, the teacher workforce remains stubbornly white-dominated. Why? Research shows problematic certification measures, adverse working conditions and discriminatory hiring practices contribute to keeping Black people from becoming teachers or keeping their teaching positions.

Certification exams are barriers to entry

Obtaining a professional license is a critical milestone in a teacher's career. Yet licensure policies and exams long have kept Black teachers out, similar to race-based policies such as literacy tests that once prevented Black people from voting in the segregated South.

By several measures, standardized tests have been found to be biased against people of color. Research shows they contain culturally biased questions that privilege white test-takers.

What's more, certification and licensing exams prevent the entry of Black people into teaching and determine which teachers are retained. As a result, from 1984 to 1989, about 21,500 Black teachers lost their jobs, according to one study of the impact of reliance on licensure exams and policies.

This gatekeeping function is especially troublesome because other studies show exam results are poor predictors of teacher effectiveness. In one study, Black teachers in North Carolina with low exam scores nonetheless had positive outcomes on Black student achievement.

Difficult work conditions lead to turnover

Black teachers have the highest rate of turnover among teachers, both white and nonwhite. When asked to reflect on their careers, longtime Black teachers say they face constant racist microaggressions from fellow teachers, non-Black parents and district personnel.

Black male teachers in particular say their expertise is overlooked and that they are forced to play disciplinarian for Black boys. Other studies show Black teachers are systematically sorted into schools with fewer resources, chronic turnover and leadership instability.

Last-in-first-out hiring policies exacerbate the issue. Layoffs of this nature disproportionately affect the students most often taught by beginning teachers and teachers of color.

All of this makes teaching a precarious profession for Black educators.

Discriminatory hiring practices

Teacher hiring practices have made this cycle, and they can break it, too.

One study found equally qualified Black teacher applicants receive fewer job offers than white candidates. When hired, Black teachers are more likely to be selected by principals of color, and they, too, are a disproportionately small percentage of school leaders.

Principals say they seek teachers who best fit their school culture. Yet research shows that definitions of "fit" rely on subjective traits and personal attributes, and often this means excluding Black teachers.

The nation faces a massive teacher shortage, but there is no shortage of potential teachers of color. Seven decades after Brown, it is a lack of willingness to hire and retain them that is missing.

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How Black teachers lost when civil rights won in Brown v. Board

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As the nation marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board, one of its most significant side effects − the large-scale loss of Black teachers − continues to affect America's schools.

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Do you clearly define the issue or topic?

Brown vs the Board of Education was a real turning point for African American student education. With the passing of Brown vs the Board of Education, it meant that African American students could no longer be discriminated against when deciding where they want to get their education from. After the long era of segregation in the United States, the passing of Brown vs the Board of Education was a real turning point to begin rebuilding the trust that had been long broken among the nation.

In many ways, this set forth a new pathway for present day education. In this new age, African American students as well as students of all races could sit together in the same school and receive the same education regardless of their race.

In many ways we are still not where we need to be as a nation when it comes to discrimination not only in schools but in the world around us. There are still schools that discriminate and segregate African American students, but we as a nation need to band together to fight in the same way Brown vs the Board of Education did to continue to keep schools non segregated so our children can learn to love one another regardless of their race.