50 Years Later, Schools Still Segregated

"Most schools in this country are overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white," Elise Boddie, head of the education department of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., told the Washington Post. "We have still not committed ourselves as a country to the mandate of Brown versus Board of Education. If these trends are not reversed, we could easily find ourselves back to 1954."

Boddie was reacting to a new study released by the Harvard Civil Rights Project that concludes that 50 years after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American education, schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

As reported by the Post, the study indicates that progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s as courts concluded that the goals of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had largely been achieved.

However, over the past 15 years, the trend has been in the opposite direction – with the report noting that most white students now have "little contact" with minority students in many areas of the country.

"We are celebrating a victory over segregation at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated," noted the report, which was issued on the eve of the holiday celebrating King's birthday.

The Brown decision had its most dramatic impact in Southern states, where the percentage of blacks attending predominantly white schools increased from zero in 1954 to 43 percent in 1988.

However, according to the Harvard data, by 2001 the figure had fallen to 30 percent – about the same level as in 1969, the year after King's assassination.

Accentuated in recent years by the exodus of white middle-class families, the District of Columbia has long been one of the most segregated school districts in the nation.

The most segregated states for black students are New York and Illinois; the most integrated states are Wyoming and Ohio.

According to researchers, the resegregation trend picked up momentum as a result of a 1991 Supreme Court decision that authorized a return to neighborhood schools instead of busing – even if such a step would lead to segregation.

"There have been considerable gains in some areas, such as the number of [minority] students attending college," said John Jackson, education director for the NAACP. "But you still find many school districts across the country that are segregated and unequal. The implications are the same as in the fifties: Minority students in high-poverty areas are not getting a quality education."

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