Lewis Mumford Center Census 2000 American Newcomers Report

The Continuing Legacy of the Brown Decision:
Court Action and School Segregation, 1960-2000

John R. Logan
Deirdre Oakley

Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research
University at Albany

January 28, 2004

This report is based on research conducted by many staff members of the Mumford Center over the past year. We especially acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Franklin Wilson, University of Wisconsin, who made school segregation data from the late 1960’s available for analysis, and other information provided by the Department of Justice, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and National Center for Educational Statistics. This project is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and American Educational Research Association.

Public schools have struggled with their response to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. More than 700 separate court cases involving several thousand school districts have dealt with the requirement to desegregate. Yet reports from the Mumford Center (“Choosing Segregation: Racial Imbalance in American Public Schools, 1990-2000,” January 2002) and the Harvard Civil Rights Project (“Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts,” August 2002) suggested a recent trend of increasing school segregation. Court decisions in the 1990’s paved the way for releasing districts from desegregation orders in many cases even if whites and minorities were again becoming more separate. School districts that voluntarily sought to retain desegregation plans became subject to lawsuits from groups that opposed those plans (as in the famous case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina).

This present study shows that the story of segregation, desegregation and resegregation is far more complex, with some surprising positive findings concerning the initial impact of Brown v. Board of Education and important limits on what it could accomplish.