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School Desegregation and the 'American Dilemma'

By Robert W. Peebles

What have we learned over this period? Where do we stand today? Race issues continue to plague this nation, and social class is closely entwined with race as families decide whether to move or remain within public schools, one of the greatest equalizing institutions in our history.

Following the Brown decision, the civil rights movement that grew during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sparked initiatives that protected rights guaranteed by the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War. Indeed, the failure of the Founding Fathers to recognize the basic equality of human beings in the final draft of the U.S. Constitution set the course of future events shown most dramatically by that tragic war. To this day, we remain seriously divided and frustrated by racial issues.

We have learned that some earlier assumptions about race and schools were erroneous. For example, we mistakenly believed that the South would have far more difficulty than the North in desegregating schools. Yet once the initial period of protest passed, highlighted by policies of "massive resistance," Southern states began to comply with the law more readily than many Northern school districts. Not that it was easy. Only with the power provided by the Supreme Court's 1971 decision in the Charlotte, N.C., busing case ( Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ) did a broad-based, serious approach to desegregation become policy in Southern school districts. Despite living for generations under Jim Crow laws, thus establishing racially segregated schools de jure, the South acquiesced and proceeded to...