For most of American history, many states and districts circumscribed education for African Americans, sometimes prohibiting it, and often forcibly segregating schools. Southern states were the biggest offenders, and the US Supreme Court finally struck down legally mandated segregation of public schools in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The ruling turns 70 years old this May.
Brown was just the start of the judicial struggle to address segregation in public schooling. As Melnick lays out, the Brown Court knew that it was easier to declare something unacceptable than to fix it, especially when the declaration itself was highly controversial. Hoping the public would more easily come to terms with Brown if it did not include remedies, the Court punted what states and districts must do to Brown II in 1955. But that was not much more concrete than the initial ruling, containing the infamously vague directive to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” while, as Melnick writes, containing no delineation of “what measures schools must institute to come into compliance with the Constitution.”
The daunting work of figuring out what desegregation would actually mean, and the even more imposing task of making millions of resistant politicians and families comply with it, would fall to lower courts unequipped and unqualified for transformative social engineering.
For about a decade after Brown, the only thing in many southern states that seemed deliberate was not desegregating. And it took time for a legal consensus to form around the basics of desegregation: Was the requirement only to end the use of race in assigning students to schools, or to eradicate the enrollment effects of segregation by compelling school integration?
As Melnick notes, the NAACP, which was instrumental in getting Brown to the Supreme Court, expressed commitment to “colorblindness” in school assignment. On principle, this is consistent with simply ending school assignment based on race, and an approach many states took in response to Brown: “freedom of choice” to allow families to select among public schools. Also consistent were voucher programs in places such as Prince Edward County, Virginia, that paid for chosen private schooling while the district closed its public schools. Of course, the results were predictable: whites heavily tended to go to school with other whites, and blacks with other blacks … if they had any school at all.
The root problem was that colorblindness after centuries of government discrimination based explicitly on color would leave segregated enrollment intact. It raised a core question: Did you really desegregate if you ended segregationist laws but let their effect—segregated enrollment—remain?
Over time the answer that emerged was “no.” But the first concrete moves toward integration came not from the courts, which had been largely powerless to force states and districts into action, but the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and new federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act the following year. The threat of Washington withholding dollars from states and districts that maintained segregated schools finally started pushing southern districts to desegregate.
The Supreme Court itself moved toward integration in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County in 1968, ruling that freedom of choice plans were not unconstitutional but insufficient to meet Brown’s requirements. School districts needed to move to “unitary” status; essentially, eliminating “racially identifiable” schools. This was pushed forward with Swann v. Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971. In Swann, the Supreme Court sided with a lower court order mandating busing to integrate North Carolina’s Charlotte‐Mecklenburg school district.
The combination of federal funding leverage and court integration orders seemed to work, at least in the South. Between 1968 and 1980 the share of southern black students attending schools that had between 90 and 100 percent minority enrollment dropped from 78 to 23 percent. And in 1973, with Keyes v. School District no. 1, Denver, the Supreme Court opened the door to desegregation orders in non‐southern districts—places with no history of de jure segregation—if districts had done things such as building schools, or creating attendance zones, with “segregative intent.”
Then the mandated integration momentum hit a wall. In its 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Michigan districts outside of Detroit, if they had no history of segregation, could not be ordered into cross‐district busing to achieve racial integration. And why would cross‐district busing with Detroit be needed? Because white flight from the city had been so great there were too few white students to make any intra‐district desegregation meaningful.
This takes us to a central reality that has bedeviled desegregation from Day One: Government might be able to force people together temporarily, but it cannot easily keep together those who would prefer to be separate. And, lamentable as it might be, the basic tendency of human beings is to live—and hence be assigned to public schools—with people like themselves. Courts, with neither elected credibility nor technical expertise, were especially ill‐suited to engineering outcomes at odds with people’s inclinations. The painful limits of this approach hit home most visibly with years of ugly anti‐busing conflict in “Athens of America” Boston, but also many other districts.
White flight, which often preceded busing as neighborhoods changed, was a quieter manifestation of the same human proclivity. Eventually, the Supreme Court had to accept reality, ruling in Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991) that districts that had made “good faith” efforts to desegregate could be declared unitary and released from court supervision.
Even within ostensibly integrated school buildings, major divisions frequently remain. Such schools are often highly segregated by classroom, with white and Asian kids more likely to be in advanced classes and black and Hispanic students more likely to be in regular or remedial. Interracial friendships—basically, bridge‐building among socially distant groups—have also been found to be negatively correlated with racial heterogeneity, especially in the region with the greatest building‐level integration: the South.
Melnick highlights that homophily—people gravitating to others like themselves—is not just a white phenomenon, but a human one. For instance, he mentions a 1980 Tennessee court case in which black families were more likely to fight for local schooling than whites. He discusses black preferences for community schooling during desegregation in Dallas and Kansas City. In the 1970s, many Chinese families opposed desegregation in San Francisco that would have moved their children out of their communities. When they lost in court, they opened private “Freedom Schools” to stay together. And many Hispanic families, in response to the Keyes decision ordering integration in Denver, fought to maintain neighborhood schooling.
In addition to analyzing the huge barriers to engineering racial integration by judicial fiat—his main topic—Melnick addresses common pronouncements such as “we know desegregation worked” and “it was a reactionary Supreme Court that killed desegregation.” For the former, Melnick notes that while black test scores improved during the peak years of desegregation, that could be a function of occurrences like massive funding increases for black schools in the South before Brown, declining acts of prejudice at the same time as school desegregation, and more. Meanwhile, he reports that numerous researchers have found mixed academic results.
As for the reactionary Court, Melnick explains that declaring districts unitary tended to come well after rulings in Dowell and other early-’90s cases easing the attainment of unitary status. And a return to more racially identifiable schools is, to a significant extent, simply a function of changing demographics: non‐Hispanic whites have become a smaller and smaller percentage of the national population.
Melnick also helpfully points out the danger of using the emotionally charged term “segregation,” or variants such as “resegregation,” in our current debates. The days of de jure segregation are, thankfully, over, and the factors affecting racial and ethnic mixing in schools are numerous. Melnick writes that using these “politically loaded terms … does little to help us understand these new realities.”
So what should we do in light of public policy’s integration impotence? Melnick is intentionally light on prescriptions, keeping to broad recommendations: focusing on improving academic outcomes for minority children and combatting racial and ethnic stereotypes. Of course, how to do those things is uncertain, at least in any way that garners widespread agreement.
Melnick also appears sympathetic to “controlled choice,” in which families can select among public schools but their choice sets are constrained by rules to foster socio‐economic balance. He bases this on what research has tended to find: programs with choice produce more sustainable integration than force, probably because families feel they have some agency over their children’s education, specific schools can offer characteristics families value, and most encouraging, distinctive schools can foster new student identities that bridge old divides. This is consistent with Contact Theory, which Melnick touches on. That theory holds that interpersonal contact among people of different groups is key to overcoming divisions, but if that contact comes under adversarial conditions it will not work. That said, Melnick also acknowledges that there is precarious political support for controlled choice: assert too much control and political backing withers.
Ultimately, Melnick’s most important insight from examining 70 years of desegregation efforts is simple, but it needs constant repetition: There is no giant judicial or policy lever we can pull to create the Coke ad ideal. Human nature is not nearly so easily overcome.
