New Faces, Old Patterns? Segregation in the Multiracial South
Introduction
A third of a century ago the schools of the South became the most integrated in the nation, a stunning reversal of a long history of educational apartheid written into the state laws and constitutions of the eleven states of the Confederacy and the six Border states, stretching from Oklahoma to Delaware, all of which had legally imposed de jure segregation until the Supreme Court prohibited it in 1954. From being almost completely segregated in their own schools, more than two-fifths of black students in the South were attending majority white schools and many more were in schools with significant diversity at the height of integration. Reversing the historic pattern, almost all of the Southern and Border states became more integrated than most Northern states with significant black enrollment.
Since the l980s, the tremendous progress in the South has been slowly eroding year by year as black students and the exploding population of Latino students become more isolated from white students. In some of the states which were most successful in achieving integration, the reversal has been much more rapid.
The Southern and Border states were the leaders in urban desegregation following the Supreme Court’s l971 Swann decision and these regions saw major efforts at something experienced nowhere in the North: comprehensive city-suburban desegregation in many of the largest urban communities. This was because the Supreme Court blocked desegregation between the city and suburban districts in the l974 Milliken decision and only the South had substantial numbers of major cities where the city and suburban schools were in a single county-wide school system. Those plans proved to be particularly effective in radically reducing racial separation over long periods of time, and their dismantling since the Supreme Court supported the ending of desegregation plans in the 1991 Dowell v.Oklahoma City has produced large and rapid increases in segregation where advances in desegregation were most prevalent. This is particularly unfortunate because those plans did produce high and relatively stable levels of desegregation and eliminate the kind of extremely segregated and unequal ghetto schools that characterize the urban North. There is also striking new evidence that the city-suburban plans produced substantially lower levels of housing segregation than were experienced in communities with separate city and suburban school districts.
Latino enrollment has quadrupled as a share of the nation’s enrollment since l968 and, though the South is the center of black population in the nation, Latino enrollment is soaring. Given the rapid surge in Latino enrollment, this report shows Latino students to be even more segregated than blacks in the South in the 2003-4 school year. Unfortunately little was ever done in most of the region to desegregate Latinos and many desegregation plans have been terminated without ever addressing the issue even as the Latino communities have become much larger and more isolated. When the school desegregation battle began in the region the focus was overwhelmingly on issues of black students being confined to separate schools that were unequal in many respects. Except in Texas, where Latino Civil Rights advocates in the G.I. Forum had been actively fighting segregation of Mexican American children, the issue of Latino segregation was largely ignored. In fact, in the early days, some districts including Houston and Miami-Dade counted Latino students as whites and used them to “desegregate” black students, often bringing together two disadvantaged groups. Most of the major desegregation plans of the region were in place before the Supreme Court explicitly recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregate in the 1973 Keyes decision and they were never modified to take that decision into account. The key decision that led to major desegregation of the South was the l991 Dowell decision, in which the Supreme Court authorized the termination of the desegregation plan in Oklahoma City, ending desegregation rights in a large city where the enrollment growth was being driven by Latinos in a community where the desegregation plan ignored Latinos.
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