Evanston, a large suburb north of Chicago, has a population of 80,000 of which 11.5% is Negro. It borders Chicago on the south, Skokie on the west, the village of Wilmette on the north, and Lake Michigan on the east. The median family income in 1960 was $9,193 (the median for the lowest census tract was $5,605 and for the highest $17,250); yet Evanston comprises the entire income spectrum, with almost 7% of its population in families with annual incomes of $3,000 or less. Evanston is significantly above the national average in education—the median number of school years completed being 12.8 (the lowest tract averaged 9.6 and the highest was over 16). Twenty-seven per cent of Evanston's adult population are college graduates.

Berkeley, California, is a compact city of 111,268 residents, housed within 9.7 square miles, with a resulting population density of 11,471 per square mile—one of the highest in northern California. It is a city of socioeconomic contrasts. The “Flats,” encompassing the western two-thirds of the city, is a low-lying area containing the city's major business and industrial areas. Here, too, live the vast majority of Berkeley's minority groups and low-income families. The “Hills,” which comprises the eastern one-third, is solidly residential, predominantly Caucasian, and generally expensive. Bisecting the Hills and stretching briefly into the Flats is the University of California, Berkeley's major landmark.

New Haven has a population of just over 150,000, and approximately 15% of its population is nonwhite (virtually all Negroes). Just under 1% of the population is native or first generation Puerto Rican. Like many other New England cities, New Haven is highly “ethnic,” and is ethnically self-conscious. Besides the Negro segment of the population, almost 17% is of Italian stock; other identifiable nationality groups include Irish, German, Russian, and Polish. Many of the central Europeans are Jewish, and approximately two-thirds of the community is Roman Catholic. Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Italians, and to a lesser extent, Jews all tend to live within identifiable geographical boundaries. New Haven politics have tended to polarize around ethnic loyalties.

Pasadena, California, located roughly ten miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, had a public school enrollment of slightly more than 31,000 during the 1964–65 school year. The racial distribution was 68.9% Caucasian, 21.1% Negro, and 9.9% Mexican-American and Japanese. The surrounding communities have essentially no minority group population and it is expected that migration of minority group members will continue to be concentrated in Pasadena. The residentially segregated pattern of the typical Northern city is conspicuous in Pasadena. The all-Negro neighborhood is present as is the totally white neighborhood. The intermediate areas contain various degrees of segregation.

St. Louis is the only community among the eight cities here being considered which until 1954 operated a segregated system of public education. Substantial compliance with the desegregation mandated by the fourteenth amendment was effected rapidly and with a minimum of dislocation. The initial stages of desegregation took place against a background of rapid population shifts. Like many metropolitan central cities, St. Louis has suffered an absolute decline in population since World War II, a decline which was sharpest in the 1950–60 decade when a net loss of over 100,000 residents occurred. During the same period the suburban area around St. Louis experienced an increase in population in excess of 50%.

The capital city of New York State, situated on the west bank of the Hudson River about 140 miles north of New York City, has a large range of urban, suburban, and rural land uses within its limits. Albany is obviously an old city. While it shared in the common urban experience of rapid growth during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its population in recent decades has remained close to the 127,000 reached in 1930. The 1960 census reported that Albany contained only about 130,000 residents.

San Francisco's ethnic minorities tend to be clumped in relatively small areas, with the Negro population being concentrated in three main districts. This concentration of ethnic groups leads, of course, to racial imbalance in the schools, a problem which is most serious in the elementary schools. If one considers the four main groups of the city to be Negro, Oriental (which includes the city's small Japanese and Filipino population as well as the Chinese), Spanish white, and non-Spanish white, in 1964, 36 of the 96 elementary schools contained 90% or more of one group. Of these, nine were Negro, five Oriental, nineteen Spanish white, and three non-Spanish white. In the junior high schools there is less racial imbalance, but still some: in 1964 two schools were 80% and 61% Oriental; two were 86 and 83% Negro; and two were 85 and 72% white.

The racial pattern in Chicago is illustrative of the problem facing all urban centers of the North. By 1964 nearly all of Chicago's 930,000 Negroes were grouped in racially homogeneous residential areas of the South, West, and Near North Side of the city. In the decade between 1950 and 1960 alone, the Negro population had increased by 320,000 or 52.5%. During this same period a net 399,000 white residents left the city, many resettling in suburban areas. This transformation has continued with the Negro community now constituting at least 26% of Chicago's total population.

Our purpose in this concluding analysis is to point up the various patterns which seem to emerge in these case studies. We are well aware that eight cities represent a small sample. They were selected more with reference to scholarly access than representativeness. As a result, all of the cities have universities in them. In the three cities which emerge as “most successful,” universities play a significant role—if not a dominant one—in the life of the community. Although direct participation of these universities, as such, is not emphasized in the case studies, their indirect influence may have been extremely significant in producing atypical results. Clearly we cannot hope to present any final and ultimate conclusions, but it is nevertheless possible to make a number of suggestive observations about why the school boards in some cities were able to respond to the problem of de facto school segregation more successfully and effectively than others. While there is, of course, virtually no invulnerable or uncontroversial method for measuring the relative success and failure of school boards confronted with racial imbalance in their schools, three possible yardsticks come to mind. First, do the statistics show either a decrease in the racial imbalance in some or all of a city's schools or a decrease in the trend toward increasing racial imbalance? Second, has the school system actually implemented some sort of desegregation program? Third, did the school boards (or superintendents) resolve conflict by satisfying or placating the various disputants?

The recent literature on school desegregation takes on added significance when viewed from the dramatic and frightening perspective of a summer of widespread rioting. Equality of Educational Opportunity (the Coleman Report), the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights document Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, and Raymond W. Mack's Desegregation and Education: Studies on the Equality of Educational Opportunities Provided for Americans of Different Races in Ten Communities set in bold relief the pivotal role education must play in mitigating the deleterious consequences of racial segregation.

The Office of Education's report, Equality of Educational Opportunity (the Coleman Report), and the Civil Rights Commission's report, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, have, to say the least, fundamental implications for the formulation of educational policy in the United States. Aside from their impact on legislative and administrative policymakers, and the electorate which selects those policy-makers, these reports have a separate significance for the law. They provide data essential to the resolution of current issues of the constitutional doctrine which makes up the legal matrix within which educational policy-making takes place. Further, they suggest new issues of equal import on which future programs and studies must be undertaken. The case studies in Desegregation and Education are illustrative: a number of cities have seen threatened and actual law suits to bring about elimination of de facto racial segregation in the public schools, and school administrators are concerned at the lack of sufficiently clear legal doctrine. Recently, in Hobson v. Hansen, a case dealing with the District of Columbia public schools, Judge J. Skelly Wright made use of some of the data in the reports in ordering the school board to take various steps to deal with inequalities in educational opportunity.

There is a tough question in the sociology of law facing the nation. It is: To what extent is the inferior education of Negroes due to a failure to enforce the fourteenth amendment, which requires that the states must treat all its citizens equally and without discrimination? There may be more felicitous phrasings of the problem, but this puts it bluntly.

Perhaps the most arresting conclusion in the summary of the Coleman Report is the statement: “a pupil's achievement is strongly related to the educational backgrounds and aspirations of the other students in the school” (p. 22). The point is stated more forcefully later, in the body of the Report: “Attributes of other students account for far more variation in the achievement of minority group children than do any attributes of school facilities and slightly more than do attributes of staff” (p. 302). I always thought so. I like this finding because it coincides with my own views about social democracy and the schools. This was forcefully expressed in 1950 by Chief Justice Vinson, when the Supreme Court ruled racial isolation of a single Negro in the Texas Law School constitutionally unequal on grounds that fellowship and extracurricular association with other students were as essential to legal education as were equivalent teachers, books, and lessons. Now in the Coleman Report there is persuasiveness in documentation and analysis for this view which is more convincing than personal or judicial opinion. This is one of several points I have selected for comment from a series of recent social science reports on race as a factor in national school policy. In looking directly at only a few points one can merely pause to salute the energy, daring, intelligence, and skill of the social scientists who have prepared these stimulating, impressive, and important documents.