USSCHOOLS

Desegregation court cases and school demographic data

Based upon the historic Brown v. Board of Education court decision, there have been many efforts to require school districts to make efforts to reduce school segregation. Most of these were in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially the main focus was in the South, but eventually many Northern school districts also faced court action or mandates from the federal government. The Mumford Center at the University at Albany (directed at that time by John Logan and in an effort coordinated by Deirdre Oakley) developed a database of these enforcement actions. From this page you can look up information about any school district, searching by the district name within a state or metropolitan region. You can also download the entire database.

Search our database of hundreds of court cases involving race and public schools. Use the menu below to select a state or a metropolitan region, and then a school district within it.

  • Browse school districts by selecting a state:
                     
  • Browse school districts by selecting an MSA:
                     

Click here for additional technical information on the sources of data and construction of indices. From the download page , you can get the data.