School Segregation After] the Brown Decision

African Americans attending schools with whites in the South and border states, 1954 and 1964

Percentage

I Data not available

"he 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibited racial segregation in the nation's public schools. But many states and school districts ignored federal court orders to comply with the desegregation order. Although Eisenhower put down Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus's public challenge to federal authority in 1957, he did little else to ensure compliance with Brown. President Kennedy, similarly, was reluctant to alienate white southern voters. He named to the federal judiciary staunch supporters of school segregation. One of his appointees, E. Gordon West of Louisiana, called the Brown ruling "one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time."

The accompanying maps show the slow progress of school desegregation in the South. In 1954,

3,870 southern school districts had both white and black students.

(The South here includes Alabama,

Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,

Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi,

North Carolina, South Carolina,

Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.) In only three of these districts did any white and black students attend school together: Arkansas (two) and Texas (one). Only one of the twenty-three school districts in Maryland was desegregated. The percentage of African American students attending schools with whites in the South was slightly above zero.

In 1964 compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling had improved somewhat in the border states, but little in the Deep South. Of the 2,586 school districts in the South that now had black and white students (the number of school districts had declined as a result of consolidation), 1,150 reported that they were desegregated. Only 3 of Louisiana's 67 districts were desegregated, 4 of Mississippi's 150 districts, and 9 of Alabama's 118 districts.

In Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, fewer than 4 percent of black and white children attended school together.

0  4 10 20 57 68

More substantive progress had occurred in the border regions, where black and white students were far more likely to attend school together. In Kentucky, for example, 68 percent of the black students attended school with whites; figures in other southern states were Maryland 51 percent, West Virginia 63 percent, Missouri 42 percent, and

Elementary school Percentage of 100 50 0 black students

Oklahoma 31 percent. Nearly 8 percent of black and white children in Texas also attended school together. But overall, compliance had been slow and incomplete.

Ensure admission of the black students, Faubus ordered the closing of both of Little Rock's high schools. In subsequentyears, more subtle means were found to discourage the desegregation of Little Rock schools.

In 1964,all of the schools in Little Rock remained segregated (see the accompanying map). African Americans lived mostly in the eastern section of Little Rock, and their children attended allblack elementary schools and an all-black high school. White students attended all-white schools, including Central High.

By 1980, however, the schools of Little Rock had become fully desegregated (see the accompanying map ).This map shows that not only did all schools include both white and black students, but that the proportion of black and white students varied little among the schools. The balance was achieved mostly by busing black students into formerly white schools. But the map also shows that Little Rock was itself becoming predominantly black. Busing to achieve racial balance caused many whites to leave Little Rock and move to the mostly white suburbs. By 1980 Central High, which had been exclusively white in 1957, was two-thirds black. The same was true of most of the other schools in Little Rock.

School officials worried that Little Rock schools would soon be nearly all black.

Similar patterns were evident in the North, too. Supreme Court rulings might change the law of the land, but the attitudes of the people were less malleable. Judicial opinions could change, too. In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down desegregation efforts that used race as the sole factor in assigning pupils to schools.