SCHOOL DESEGREGATION AND THE PIPELINE OF PRIVILEGE
Abstract
The struggle to end racial segregation in America’s public schools has been long and arduous. It was ostensibly won in the 1954 Brown v. Tulsa Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. But racist resistance has been intense. Years later, extensive school segregation remains for Black children. The High Court has essentially overturned Brown without explicitly saying so. This paper assesses the effects of educational desegregation that has managed to occur. Discussion concerning the results of desegregation has revolved around test scores and the difficulties involved with “busing,” but the principal positive effect is often overlooked: namely, that the substantial rise of the Black-American middle class in the last half-century has been importantly enhanced by school desegregation. This paper reviews the educational backgrounds of eighteen Black Americans who have risen to the highest status positions in American politics and business in recent decades. They represent the desegregated Black cohort who succeeded because desegregation enabled them to break into the nation’s deeply established pipeline of privilege.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RACIAL DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
White supremacists over the past six decades have managed to roll back the historic 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown ruling outlawing racially segregated schools. Black American children in the nation’s public schools are today virtually as segregated as they were prior to Brown. 1
In 1955, the High Court undercut its historic desegregation ruling with a vague “all deliberate speed” order. The White South, quite deliberate but rarely speedy, viewed this order as a sign of weakness. This second decision had the unfortunate, if unintended, consequence of heightening opposition to the original decision. Resistance groups called White Citizens’ Councils—basically middle-class Ku Klux Klans—sprang up throughout the South.
Consequently, scant progress was made for a decade. In response to this delay, three strong Federal Court rulings emerged. In 1968, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia struck down a so-called “freedom of choice” attempt to avoid desegregation. In 1971, the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision established that desegregation required affirmative action—including the “busing” of students throughout Charlotte’s metropolitan area. In 1973, Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado applied the Swann ruling to a non-Southern city for the first time.
In reaction to this progress, strong resistance to school integration developed—led by President Richard Nixon, who sternly opposed the “busing” needed to achieve it. This opposition gathered strength as it seized on the claim of massive “White flight” from cities to avoid desegregation. Bolstered by the publicized assertions of sociologist James Coleman, conservative judges began to use it as an excuse to roll back desegregation orders (Orfield and Eaton, 1996).
The “White flight” argument ignored two key points. First, the Coleman analysis was seriously flawed. While White families did move to the suburbs and private schools more during the first year of integration, it was basically a “hastening up” effect. That is, large urban districts that started school desegregation did not lose significantly more White students over the critical 1967–1976 period than did districts that remained racially segregated. Phrased differently, desegregating districts were already losing White families before the process and after a few years would have lost just as many White families without any desegregation whatsoever (Farley et al., 1980).
Second, the “White flight” phenomenon was especially acute in huge cities such as Detroit, MI where the High Court flatly rejected metropolitan plans for school desegregation in Milliken v. Bradley (1974; Pettigrew 2004). But in smaller cities, such as Richmond, VA, 2 Lexington, KY, and Wilmington, DE, metropolitan plans were far more feasible.
The eighteen cases reviewed in this paper were obviously not picked at random. They represent the very top echelon of Black participation in government and business: all three Black Americans at the presidential and vice-presidential level; all three Black members of the U.S. Senate; all eleven Black CEOs of major companies; and a foremost television newscaster. Arguably, these are eighteen of the most influential and powerful Black leaders in America today. Only one—Senator Warnock—seems not to have benefitted importantly from early entry into the White-dominated pipeline of privilege.
Too much focus has been given to the micro-effects of school desegregation (e.g., changes in test scores and racial attitudes), while ignoring the later-life constructive meso- and macro-societal effects of the process. The extensive 2011 NBER study previously described found that desegregated schools led not only to improved test scores but also to higher annual earnings and better health as adults (Johnson 2011). And Johnson’s (2012) follow-up research found these positive outcomes of desegregated schools even extended to the next generation of Black pupils. This present paper extends these positive outcomes of desegregated education still further to include the possibility of talented Black Americans cracking into the nation’s pipeline of privilege.
We can hope for two interrelated future trends: many more Black Americans able to join in the nation’s pipeline of privilege and the pipeline itself becoming less necessary for Black success. As the Black American middle-class expands, we will witness more examples like Senator Warnock rising to prominence without having benefitted from the largely-White structures of access to privilege.
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