Using Federal Power to Resegregate American Schools
Using Federal Power to Resegregate American Schools
Prior to passage of the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) in1965, a savvy Lyndon Johnson, who knew the South would never willinglydesegregate schools, crafted the federal legislation so that large sums ofmoney would go to any of the segregated systems of the South that would complywith the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, of course, banned racialdiscrimination in any public institution receiving federal funds. This strategy of carrot (ESEA) followingstick (Civil Rights Act) worked like a charm, and the “segregation now,segregation forever” crowd quietly resolved to accept the federal millions and,in doing so, reluctantly complied with the Supreme Court’s mandate handed downin the unanimous 1954 Brown decision,which had been largely ignored in the South.
I was a sophomore in one of those small segregated Southernhigh schools in 1965, and I remember the first black kids who, until that time,had had a 60-mile roundtrip daily bus ride to endure if they wanted to go tohigh