What a horrible world that would be, right? If, in some alternate reality, the Supreme Court decision had been reversed, and we continued to send our children to segregated schools with equally segregated resources. Imagine the disparities that might have emerged between Black and White students over 70 years if that 1954 Supreme Court decision had slipped away into the ether.
Well, look around.
America’s current school segregation is so bad that talking about it plainly seems like over-exaggeration. “American schools are more segregated now than during the Civil Rights Movement” might elicit an eyeroll, even if that’s been borne out by research. If you mention that wealthy white parents are creating new school districts that purposefully zone-out poor and Black students you might receive your second eyeroll, but that trend has grown increasingly popular throughout some southern states. We might not have state-sponsored segregation of schools, but de facto segregation has returned, and all signs point to it getting worse before it gets better. So, did Brown v. Board actually happen? Does it matter, if the end resembles pre-Brown education more every day?
America’s racial landscape is more complex than in 1954, if you’ll excuse a clarifying point before we move on. The White portion of the population has shrunk, while the Asian and Latino populations in America have grown, making the black and white comparisons of the Civil Rights Era more complex.
Schools today aren’t “all-White” or “all-Black”, but they still tend to follow the pre-Brown model of highly ranked “White” schools and poorly ranked “Black” schools. For example, the top-rated schools that feed Ivy League colleges are majority White, followed by Asian, with near-single-digit Black and Latino populations. And the lowest performing districts tend to be majority Black, followed by Latino. While the picture is more complex, the disparities are still clear.
So back to the main question: did Brown v. Board happen? Of course it did. But we cannot keep teaching it as history instead of an ongoing process.
I know it is tempting. It has been called “the court’s one undisputed triumph”: for at least one moment in American history, our institutions did the unequivocal “right thing”, and without a single dissenting vote. For social studies teachers all across the country, treating it as a watershed moment of racial harmony is irresistible: no parent groups will get mad for teaching it, it’s built into every board-approved curriculum in every state, and kids can stand proud of their country.
But the history that followed is just as important as the Supreme Court decision, and that history has continued evolving through today. Most know (or teach) about the Little Rock 9, about how a crowd of racists attempted to keep nine Black students from entering the previously all-White school, and how the National Guard had to be sent to Arkansas to keep the peace.
Less people know (or teach) that the Little Rock 9 represented just one outcropping of “Massive Resistance” to integration of schools. Massive Resistance was an organized effort across the South to prevent racial integration by any means necessary: laws were passed to strip funding from integrated schools, violence was threatened (and enacted) against Black students, and new, private “segregation academies” opened that preserved all-White schools.
Some districts, faced with the horror of integrated schools, decided just to shut down altogether: Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its entire public school system for five years. Going to school with Black students was deemed worse than not going to school at all.
Barely learned or taught at all is the later opposition to “bussing”, especially in the North. Courts across the country began to decide that districts were not doing enough to actively desegregate schools. The solution was “bussing” students out of often-racially-segregated neighborhood schools and to other schools, in other parts of town, in order to create integrated schools. White parents took on their own “massive resistance”, blocking school entrances, hurling insults and objects at buses of Black students, and boycotting schools altogether. This was not the pre-Civil Rights rural South: this was the 1970s urban North, in cities like Boston and Cleveland and Detroit. Nearly 20 years after the “watershed” Brown ruling, white parents in the North were still pulling their kids out of schools due to the presence of Black students. Many people who opposed “bussing” are still alive; at least one of them is currently President of the United States.
And, at the bottom of the learned/taught curve, we have the less obvious, more insidious version of Brown blowback, and the one that students need to know the most: the flight of “well-meaning” White families out of cities and to suburban districts. Another, perhaps equally influential Supreme Court decision was Milliken v. Bradley. This ruling decided that Brown’s desegregation ruling did not extend beyond city limits. This meant that the dream of all-White schools was still alive, as long as you drew a chalk circle around an area, called it a new name, and ensured that only White families could live there.
That mechanism, enforced through racist housing covenants, racist realtor practices, red-lining, intimidation, and plain-old price tags meant that Brown never happened in those new districts. The clock was turned back, by choice, and the effects of these “pre-Brown” districts are still felt today. In my hometown of Pittsburgh, Niche lists five suburban high schools as the best public schools in the region: North Allegheny, Mt. Lebanon, Fox Chapel, Upper Saint Clair, and South Fayette. Even now, nearly 70 years after Brown, these schools have barely changed in terms of Black and White students. Mt. Lebanon’s student population, for example remains 83.9% White and 1.8% Black. That’s a 1.8% gain in Black student population since Pennsylvania was desegregated in 1881, over 140 years ago.
I am not suggesting these schools should not exist. I am not suggesting they should be combined with the majority-Black Pittsburgh Public School district, kicking off “bussing” controversies again. I do not begrudge parents for moving to these districts, to send their kids to the “best” schools possible. I am only suggesting that to teach Brown v. Board in a school that is 84% White and 1.8% Black means that you cannot stop at 1954 and pretend that the matter is settled history. It’s not settled history when you teach it at the 90% Black Westinghouse Academy either.
Students are walking into increasingly segregated schools every day, through buildings, classrooms, and districts that were shaped (in living memory) by Brown and the decades of resistance to it. The decision and its fallout hangs over our schools like a specter, shaping the lives of students drastically without their knowledge. They don’t deserve the textbook version of Brown V. Board. They deserve the truth.
