The ABCs of School Integration

School integration is among the great symbols of our nation's racial progress.

In 1954, when nine white Supreme Court justices mustered the moral courage to declare in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," they challenged a nation and its people to confront – and undo – centuries of white supremacy. It was, as Justice Breyer recently commented, the "Court's finest hour."

Saying it and doing it were two different things. In the years immediately following the decision, pro-segregation riots erupted in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and Georgia. In Arkansas, federal troops attended school alongside nine black teenagers – the Little Rock Nine – in order to protect them from racial violence, while federal marshals shielded six-year-old Ruby Bridges as she tried to enroll in a New Orleans school.

In Prince Edward County, Va., officials simply closed public schools rather than integrate them. White students were sent to private academies; black students didn't head back to class until 1963, when the Ford Foundation funded private schools for them.

Ten years after the Brown ruling, the Rev. Bruce Klunder was killed – run over by a bulldozer – protesting the construction of a new segregated school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1971, after the Court authorized busing as a means to integrate schools, protests erupted in the North, too.

In 1988, school integration reached its modest peak, with 45 percent of our nation's black children having access to majority white schools and to the social and financial assets tied up in them. In the 90s, however, the Court began eroding enforcement of its own Brown decision, and, by 2003, researchers confirmed that schools not only were resegregating but also were more segregated than they had been decades earlier. At the dawn of the 21st century, one in six black children attended what researchers call "apartheid schools."

And then, this summer, a new Supreme Court – flush with right-wing appointees – wrote what NAACP Chair Julian Bond calls, "Brown's final epitaph," declaring unconstitutional the modest means many districts have used to create and maintain integrated schools. In Bond's words, the Court has "turned its back on millions of Black and Latino children … leaving them to hang on the ropes of racial and economic disenfranchisement."

School integration may be commonly evoked as a symbol of hard-won racial progress, but it is, in many ways, a false symbol. The promise of Brown – the promise of equal, and integrated, educational opportunities for our nation's children – has yet to be fulfilled.

This edition of The Anti-Bias Classroom (The ABCs) reminds us that the road to school integration has not been a straight line, but rather a winding road that has crossed back over itself time and again. As you prepare your lessons this school year, we invite you to use the activities and resources provided here to help your students understand the complexities of the school integration movement, so that they might one day help construct a road forward.

Special thanks to Teaching Tolerance team members Rod Davis, Tafeni English, Michelle Garcia, Tiffany Rogers, Rhonda Thomason and Victoria Williams, as well as Lecia Brooks, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center, and Jeff Sapp, professor of education at California State University at Dominguez Hills, for their comments and guidance.