March to diversity in U.S. schools spans generations

Darlene Superville

WASHINGTON — In the first three decades after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional for black and white children to attend separate public schools, children of different races and backgrounds were moved onto the same campuses and shared classrooms, learning side by side and from one another.

This era of racial inclusiveness began losing momentum in the 1990s, after a series of rulings from a Supreme Court distinctly more conservative than the one that issued the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Movement slowed even more last Thursday, when the court rejected a pair of school diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., in an eagerly awaited — but largely expected — decision announced as the court winds down this term.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that school districts in the two cities could not use students’ race as a factor in deciding which schools they attend. Doing so, the court’s conservative justices said, violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

Still, the decision was not a complete repudiation of using race in making school assignments; the court left the door open in limited circumstances. But the ruling threatens similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide and puts new limits on the methods they may use to diversify their campuses.

It is the latest ruling on race and education, dating to the court’s landmark — and unanimous — decision in Brown outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

In the wake of that watershed decision and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, public schools became more racially diverse.

In the South, where racial separation had been most common and enshrined in law, the percentage of black students studying at mostly white schools jumped from 2 percent to 33 percent by the late 1960s, according to a study by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project.

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court gave judges broad power to remedy racial segregation if districts failed to do so, including busing students to distant campuses and redrawing school district lines to achieve school integration. Two years later, the court did an about-face and curtailed judges’ ability to impose area-wide remedies, including busing to neighboring school districts.

By the late 1980s, the Harvard project found, 44 percent of Southern black pupils were going to mostly white schools.

But the commitment to racial inclusion began to wane in the 1990s with the appointment of more conservative Supreme Court justices, who issued rulings limiting the scope of court-imposed school desegregation orders and permitting the return of segregated neighborhood schools.

A 1991 decision in the case of Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell made it easier for districts to drop forced busing once racial diversity had been achieved, even if neighborhood schools would revert to being racially segregated.

The following year, in Freeman v. Pitts, the high court said lower courts could end supervision of some aspects of school desegregation plans once the districts achieved integration incrementally.

Several large school districts took steps to end their desegregation orders after those decisions. The Harvard project found the effects most apparent in the South.

Harvard professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr., who runs the university’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says many school districts today look as they did during the period before Brown.

Ogletree, who was in court to hear Chief Justice John Roberts read the conservative majority’s opinion, said the Brown decision was the high point of the Supreme Court’s consideration of the issue of achieving racial equality in education.

“What we have seen in the subsequent 50-plus years are fractured, conflicting and awfully contradictory opinions,” he said. “A unanimous court in 1954 has been followed by fractured and fragmented courts in the last 50 years.”

The court last tackled the issue of race and education in 2003, when it upheld the use of race in admissions to the University of Michigan’s law school. Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice who wrote that opinion, since has retired from the court. She was replaced by the more conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who voted with the majority last Thursday.

Neither the Louisville nor Seattle school plan had been ordered by the courts. Rather, the districts developed and implemented them on their own. Parents sued after their children were denied admission, because of their race, to the schools they wanted to attend.

Lower federal courts had supported the districts. The Bush administration sided with the parents, arguing that while racial diversity is a noble goal, it should be achieved only through colorblind means.

“It’s a good decision,” said Michael Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, which supported the parents in the case.

He said schools in those districts were not about to suffer from “racial isolation,” meaning that race did not have to be a factor in their decision-making about school assignments.

Mary Frances Berry, a former chairman and 25-year member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said the ruling “just means that people are closed off from having any kind of goal at all in communities if they wish to desegregate, and if they think that their kids can benefit from a diverse student population.”

Two-thirds of black students and three-fourths of Latino students already attend segregated schools, as do whites, and last Thursday’s decision does not help, Berry said.
“It just makes it harder,” she said. “It’s already hard.”

Darlene Superville has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1994.

(Associated Press)