Chapter 8: School Desegregation and Intergroup Relations: A Review of the Literature

The history of black-white contact in the United States is long and complex. However, the last 35 years have seen changes in relations between blacks and whites of a magnitude virtually unparalleled before, except for the period immediately after the Civil War. One of the most controversial of these changes was the decision handed down in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case in 1954, in which the Supreme Court overturned the earlier doctrine that “separate but equal" public facilities for blacks and whites could be mandated by state law. Instead, it argued that such separation in the schools "generates a feeling of inferiority (in black children) that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Thus, enforced segregation of the schools by race was held to violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution (Read, 1975; Wisdom, 1975) and to provide an inherently unequal education for black and white children. The Brown decision and later attempts to implement it raised a storm of controversy (Edelman, 1973; Hochschild, 1984; Kluger, 1976; Lukas, 1985). White resistance to the policy was expressed in an extraordinary number of ways, ranging from physical attacks on black students attempting to enroll in previously all-white schools, to legal stratagems aimed at delaying desegregation, to the founding of over 3,000 private academies set up to serve as alternatives to desegregated schools. Prince Edward County in Virginia literally closed down its public school system for several years rather than desegregate until the Supreme Court ruled that unacceptable (Bell, 1980; Kluger, 1976; Smith, 1965). Thus, efforts to achieve school desegregation were stymied for over 10 years. In fact, in 1964, a full 10 years after the Brown decision, about