About the Conference
Since the 1970s, no region of the United States experienced more widespread public school integration than the American South. Broad racial desegregation in the South was accompanied by a host of beneficial social and economic changes: substantial in-migration from other regions; increased housing integration; robust economic growth, especially in metropolitan centers; and greater progress than in any region toward the goal of closing the nation’s black-white academic achievement gap.
Yet in the year 2002, even as the nation has become ever more racially and ethnically diverse, most Southern schools may rapidly resegregate by race and by socioeconomic class. Legal and social forces impelled these prospective changes, yet neither the root causes nor their vast social and political consequences were adequately explored by scholars, public policy makers or educational advocates.
To begin that important work, the conference organizers assembled a remarkable group of thinkers and activists. Collectively, they brought decades of experience in research, scholarship, policymaking, and advocacy to the conference’s vital discussion. Attendees heard the latest educational trends, policy implications and possible agendas for public action.
Although school desegregation was a central focus, discussion was not limited to the effects of “unitary status” findings alone, i.e., the termination of court-supervised desegregation plans. Panelists also reflected on the likely impact of the nationwide push for school accountability — and the decades-long fight for school resource reform — on the future of integrated public schooling.
More than 200 individuals, including scholars, civil rights advocates, policymakers, lawyers and school administrators, attended the conference. A separate briefing for journalists on the new research presented at the conference was held in conjunction with the University of North Carolina, School of Journalism. This press briefing provided journalists an opportunity to ask questions to the researchers about their studies, and to obtain important background information that facilitated their deeper understanding of the issues.
Publications:
The papers developed for this conference were later published as both a 2005 book, School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? by UNC Press, and in the UNC School of Law, North Carolina Law Review, Volume 81, Number 4 (2003), The Resegregation of Southern Schools? A Crucial Moment in the History (and the Future) of Public Schooling in America.
Conference organizers:
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
The UNC Center for Civil Rights
The North Carolina Law Review
The Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University