Separate and Unequal 60 Years After “Brown v. Board”
ProPublica has published Segregation Now, an in-depth history of school integration and re-segregation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The experience of Tuscaloosa is a microcosm of the history of the South’s experiment with school integration and the slippage from that goal when, in the 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court released school districts from their court orders and accelerated its move away from support for voluntary school integration and affirmative action.
It is clear in Tuscaloosa’s story—and evident all across America this week, as on Saturday, May 17th, we mark the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education—that once courts release communities in the South from their court orders, re-segregation becomes inevitable. Deeply segregated northern cities and their rings of suburbs follow a similar path. According to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, the most segregated schools in the nation for black and Latino students are in New York.
In Tuscaloosa, according to ProPublica, since 2000, decisions have been made and deals cut to build new schools in white neighborhoods to attract families back from private schools, but the promises for greater investment in the schools of the black neighborhoods have been broken and abandoned. “The night the Tuscaloosa school board voted to split up the old Central, board member Bryan Handler pledged that there would be no winners and losers. Yet while Northridge (high school in the white neighborhood) offered students a dozen Separate and Unequal 60 Years After “Brown v. Board” | janresseger: