After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation

Extract

After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. By Charles T. Clotfelter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 216p. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Those who live or have lived in metropolitan areas that faced court-ordered desegregation of the schools in the latter part of the twentieth century have likely heard a common theory about the connection of those efforts to the state of the relevant city. It goes something like this: Once federal courts ordered city schools to desegregate, many white city dwellers either fled to the suburbs for protection or plucked their kids from city schools and enrolled them in private ones. Under the first scenario, the end of neighborhood schools negatively affected the city, as families in once-vital neighborhoods abandoned desegregating city schools they perceived as problematic for their children's education for virtually lily-white suburban schools thought to be of a higher quality. Under the second scenario, white parents remained in the city of their birth but undermined desegregation efforts by transferring their children to private schools (which were mostly Catholic in the Northeast and Midwest and mostly newly opened in the South). In the end, long-frustrated federal judges and civil rights leaders ultimately succeeded in increasing the levels of interaction between white and black children, but their efforts had significant side effects for those cities as well.