Re-segregating the South (and country)
With Jena on the media radar, NPR did a story this week about the larger issue of re-segregation of U.S. schools. Citing a recent report from the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, NPR notes that -- thanks to legal and political advocacy in the 1950s and 60s, the South had become the national leader for school integration.But a series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1990s -- and most recently in the Louisville and Seattle decisions about desegregation orders -- have turned back the clock. As the UCLA report (pdf) notes:
Desegregation is often treated as if it were something that occurred after the Brown decision in the l950s. In fact, serious desegregation of the black South only came after Congress and the Johnson Administration acted powerfully under the l964 Civil Rights Act; serious desegregation of the cities only occurred in the l970s and was limited outside the South. Though the Supreme Court recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregation remedies in 1973, there was little enforcement as the Latino numbers multiplied rapidly and their segregation intensified.That's a critical backdrop to stories of race and schools like the Jena 6.
Resegregation, which took hold in the early 1990s after three Supreme Court decisions from 1991 to 1995 limiting desegregation orders, is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated—the South.
2 Comments:
One interesting result of Katrina is that the Catholic school system along the Coast consolidated it's schools which in many cases were completely segregated. So many Catholic school buildings were damaged or destroyed, they were forced to desegregate. In many cases either the black or white school was destroyed.
With all due respect to the work ofThe Institute for Southern Studies and "Facing South", I am concerned that this article falls into the unfortunate trap of looking uncritically at the way the "resegregation" issue has been raised and the demeaning view of the African American community contained within it. Much of the work of the Harvard Civil Rights Project and other groups ringing the bell for warning us all about resegregation proceeds from a historically flawed analysis of the nature of segregation and the real goals of the black community's opposition to it. More than that, it undervalues the black community's capacity for responsibility, advocacy and development. I would hope that there is an opportunity to more critically and responsibly look at these issues and their connection to current struggles.
I am writing this to you from Little Rock Arkansas where I grew into adulthood thinking about and engaging in the struggle against segregation and where I grow tired of some of the misinformed and arrogant assumptions made by my liberal friends about where we have come from and where we are going.
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