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SCHOOL DESEGREGATION

Desegregation in the 1970s

By 1972 black children and white children in the South were going to school together. Much of the resistance to desegregation evident in the late 1950s and 1960s had been resolved in the South. The Department of Justice's efforts at enforcement, alongside the threat of cutting off federal funds under the 1964 Education Act, had effectively desegregated many southern schools. When desegregation moved north, however, circumstances changed. In 1970 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursued fifteen desegregation cases; in 1973 it pursued one.

Moving Schoolchildren

In 1971 the Supreme Court decided Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. It held that the Constitution required school districts to dismantle systems that had long been segregated. The Court specific-ally held that this might mean changing attendance zones and putting children on school buses for the purpose of school desegregation. While courts ordered busing to desegregate schools, President Nixon opposed it. He intended to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would not pursue desegregation. The Department of Justice under him also stopped pursuing desegregation cases. Congress considered forbidding courts from ordering busing for the purposes of integration. Nonetheless, the district courts continued to hear such cases.

Boston

In Boston federal judge Arthur Garrity ordered a program of busing to desegregate the school system. Garrity supervised the busing program because the Boston school board, historically unresponsive to the needs of Boston's black community, refused to comply with the court order. African-American students were bused to South Boston High School, located in the white ethnic community of South Boston, less than two miles from Roxbury. White residents of South Boston were overwhelmingly opposed to the busing program. To them it violated the tradition of local control of schools and threatened the historic pattern of segregated housing in Boston. Their protests were loud and often unruly; fights between whites and blacks at South Boston High School were common. In the face of such opposition many African-American parents became uneasy about desegregation. They were concerned with the toll such hostility would take on their children and were afraid that the violence would harm their children's education. In an attempt to resolve the crisis Judge Garrity worked out a compromise that emphasized black school board participation and the hiring of black teachers. But whites remained hostile to desegregation and transferred their children from the public school system to Boston's private schools, whose high cost limited black participation. The protests faded, and Boston's schools became more segregated than ever.

Urban/Suburban Segregation

In other cities white families were moving to the suburbs. In 1974 the Supreme Court decided Milliken v. Bradley, a desegregation case concerning Detroit. About 70 percent of the schoolchildren in the Detroit public schools in the 1970s were black, and the proportion was increasing. If children were to be mixed by race it would have to happen across town boundaries. However, in Milliken v. Bradley the Supreme Court made it harder for federal district courts to require busing across town lines. That would hold true for many other cities too. Most of the mixing of children that was going to happen happened before 1974.

How Mixed Are the Schools?

In the South in 1968,19 percent of black children attended mixed schools where more than half of the students were minority students. By 1980, 42.9 percent did. In the Northeast, by contrast, in 1968, 33.2 percent of black children attended mixed schools. In 1980, 20 percent did. Many white children moved to the suburbs where fewer blacks and other minorities lived and the government made less of an effort to desegregate schools. Even as schools in the South were desegregated, schools in the Northeast became more segregated, not less.