Abstract
These are dark days for school desegregation in the United States. More than one-third of black and Latinx students attend highly segregated schools, and segregation rates are far greater in many metropolitan areas. 1 Yet desegregation occupies limited bandwidth across the political spectrum. Democrats have largely joined Republicans in eschewing desegregation, and activists with otherwise irreconcilable visions for American public education tend to share the major parties’ antipathy. Some of the most vocal proponents and opponents of charters schools, for instance, agree on one thing: desegregation is not a priority. 2 Within the academy, an ascendant cadre of educational scholars has also forsworn efforts to break up racially segregated schooling. 3
This disenchantment stems partly from the voluminous academic literature documenting desegregation’s shortcomings. The reigning historical consensus stresses that desegregation layered new inequalities atop the longstanding structural ones that it failed to address. Focusing largely on legal, political, and policy battles prior to the 1980s, historians portray desegregation as an edifice whose cracked foundation weakened over time.
Dissecting Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), historians and legal scholars fault the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for emphasizing the psychological—rather than the material—harm that segregated schools inflicted upon black children. They argue that this strategy enabled the U.S. Supreme Court to view racial discrimination as an interpersonal rather than structural problem and to endorse a shallow understanding of equal educational opportunity. Desegregation thus became narrowly equated with black and white students sharing classroom space rather than with African Americans’ grander, if quite varied, visions for their educational futures. 4
Historians have also tirelessly documented the racist resistance—at the local, state, and federal level—that undermined African American aspirations for educational justice, and they have highlighted desegregation’s many deleterious effects. Those negative consequences included the closing of black schools, the dismissal and demotion of black teachers and administrators, and the transfer of students of color to inhospitable learning environments, where the perception that they were culturally or otherwise deficient contributed to discriminatory tracking and discipline. While recent studies have extended their examinations into the later twentieth century and analyzed desegregation within the context of metropolitan political economy, these new approaches have deepened rather than shifted this prevailing interpretation. 5 Writing on Brown’s fiftieth anniversary in 2004, Charles Payne effectively captured this emerging historiographical consensus when he dubbed the landmark ruling “a milestone in search of something to signify.” 6
Given this situation, how much does the history of desegregation still matter, and how much more of it is there to write? For urban historians, how centrally should desegregation figure in their work?
The works under review suggest that contemporary dismissals of desegregation miss the depths, complexity, and significance of its history. Collectively, they revise widely held understandings about how, why, and where desegregation unfolded, why it faltered, and what it meant for the people who experienced it firsthand. They also underscore the significance of education to the democratic project and reveal how the history of desegregation can help historians and the general public better understand the difficulties and imperfections involved in building a democracy. Last, they provide the opportunity to consider the consequences of abandoning desegregation.
Rachel Devlin’s A Girl Stands at the Door and Matthew Delmont’s Why Busing Failed make the most significant contributions by respectively rewriting the story of Brown’s origins and the tale of its demise. Contrary to seminal works that emphasize the careful plotting and shot-calling of men such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, Devlin recasts “the road to Brown” as “a grassroots movement spearheaded by girls and young women” (p. xii). 7 In her telling, female actors on the ground dragged the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) kicking and screaming into the fight for desegregated schooling.
Devlin’s elegantly crafted narrative begins by rewriting the history of the NAACP graduate school cases that historians and legal scholars generally emphasize as precedential stepping stones toward Brown. She then examines more than a half dozen elementary and secondary school desegregation cases that African Americans initiated in the immediate aftermath of World War II. All but one were filed on behalf of girls, and she contends that these largely unheralded cases from communities—such as Washington, D.C.; Arlington, Virginia; and Hearne, Texas—set the stage for Brown. Devlin also asserts that the testimony of black girls and young women shaped the Brown decision, underscoring the gendered expectations, competitive drive, and personal commitment to social change that drove the girls who “vastly outnumbered boys as the first to attend formerly all-white schools” (p. x) throughout the Deep South in the decade following Brown. The overrepresentation of girls and young women among desegregation’s pioneers—six of the nine in Little Rock in 1957, all four of the firsts in New Orleans in 1960, seven out of ten in Charleston in 1963—drives Devlin’s inquiry. But in seeking to solve that puzzle, she also recasts understanding of how Brown emerged.
Devlin’s reexamination of the graduate school cases is central to her intervention. Here, she shifts the focus from the famous male plaintiffs Lloyd Gaines, Heman Sweatt, and George McLaurin to the African American women she contends deserve more of the credit: Lucile Bluford and Ada Lois Sipuel. The men’s cases provide the linchpins in top-down narratives of Brown, which generally pick up the story around 1930 as the NAACP began weighing legal strategies for attacking educational inequality and abolishing segregated schooling. In 1938, the NAACP secured a victory when the Supreme Court ordered Gaines admitted to the all-white University of Missouri Law School in the absence of equivalent options for African Americans within the state, thus affirming Plessy while also hinting at its impermanence. Then, in 1950, the Court’s Sweatt and McLaurin decisions declared segregated graduate schooling and segregation within graduate classrooms unconstitutional. Following those victories, LDF attorneys revised their grade school equalization lawsuits to attack segregation directly.
Rather than focus on men who vacillated—Gaines disappeared in 1939, Sweatt was a reluctant plaintiff who later dropped out of the University of Texas law school, and McLaurin avoided the press—Devlin urges historians to focus on the women who held fast. Between 1939 and 1942, Bluford repeatedly applied to the University of Missouri School of Journalism in an unsuccessful attempt to realize Gaines’s unfulfilled challenge to segregation. She also relentlessly targeted segregated schooling as a longtime editor of the Kansas City Call newspaper. In 1947, for instance, Bluford backed an educational inequality case that Thurgood Marshall argued on behalf of twin sisters from Texas, which Devlin cites as evidence that “the LDF’s battle over segregated [grade] schooling began earlier than previously believed” (p. 100). Bluford similarly publicized a 1948 women-led school strike and desegregation lawsuit out of Merriam, Kansas, that helped spark the Brown litigation in Topeka. Sipuel, meanwhile, graduated from the University of Oklahoma law school in 1950 after doggedly—and publicly—pursuing a desegregation lawsuit that she initiated in 1946. Like Bluford and the girls and women behind the Texas and Kansas cases, she proved to be a more determined desegregationist than the men whose Supreme Court cases overshadowed her own. These women’s stories put a new face on the fight against segregated schooling, inviting students, historians, and the broader public to consider why desegregation mattered at both an individual and collective level.
Significantly, Devlin argues that gendered ideals and experiences explain the preponderance of girls and young women who led the fight for desegregated schooling. During the Jim Crow era, black girls learned early on how to respectfully and forcefully navigate social confrontation by observing their mothers do so on an almost daily basis, particularly in their domestic service roles and on shopping expeditions. Community elders also expected black girls to demonstrate cleanliness, social grace, and respectability—“assimilationist” values that both defended girls against the near-constant threat of sexual assault and projected an image that could benefit the entire race. Devlin contends these and other feminine expectations primed girls for desegregation and prepared them for the insults and injuries they faced upon entering formerly all-white schools.
Gendered ideals also shaped how these female pioneers approached desegregation, which in turn shaped legal doctrine. Devlin contends that her female protagonists conceived of desegregation as equal parts social and legal endeavor, reflecting the gendered encouragement they received to appear warm and socially open. Just as Lucille Bluford maintained that “personal and civic decency” (p. 12) contributed to Jim Crow’s demise, girls and young women engaged in a social drama for which they were well trained. In starched dresses and oxfords, they confidently testified in court, fielded reporters’ questions, and parted angry mobs to assert that they—and all other African Americans—belonged. The Supreme Court, Devlin maintains, incorporated their “words and deeds” into its Brown decision, granting it a “feminine touch.” “The language used by the Supreme Court,” she writes, “establishes the central importance of creating functional, equitable, and mutually respectful social connections within the context of modern democracy” (p. 189).
By reading the ruling’s emotional elements favorably, Devlin challenges scholars who identify its social scientific discussion of segregation’s impact upon black children’s “hearts and minds” as its greatest weakness. While hers will not be the last word on this topic, her defense of the ruling’s affective nature speaks to its complexity, hypocrisy—and Americanness—as a text that elegantly endorses democracy while assuming black inferiority. 8 This poses provocative questions for urban historians who study struggles for justice within and against racist structures. In a call-out culture that expects the forthright denunciation of intolerant ideas, how should historians discuss paradoxes like those embedded in Brown? Can democratic and anti-black sentiments, for instance, actually exist side-by-side? When examining multifaceted histories such as Brown, to what extent are historians obligated to discard the democratic baby along with its racist bathwater?
While Devlin’s nuanced work surfaces these questions, she overreaches in characterizing Brown as a grassroots struggle. This shortcoming is particularly evident in the metaphoric language she uses to describe the legal fight against segregated and inequitable schooling. In her introduction, for instance, she acknowledges that during the 1930s, the NAACP’s Charles Hamilton Houston “laid the ground work for the legal campaign for school equity and desegregation that would blossom after World War II” (p. xiv). Yet, she titles her fourth chapter, which chronicles a local desegregation battle in Kansas, “Laying the Ground Work,” and she asserts that this and the other postwar lawsuits she focuses on “would pave the way for the cases that became Brown v. Board of Education” (p. x). Who, then, “laid the ground work” for Brown?
Evidence from other scholars further complicates Devlin’s characterization of Thurgood Marshall and the national NAACP as reluctant combatants for grade school desegregation. In 1948, for instance, Marshall prodded the NAACP’s Charlotte, North Carolina, branch to shift its focus from equalization toward desegregation, which contrasts with what she documents happening elsewhere. 9 The year before Marshall similarly chided the president of the historically black South Carolina State College for accepting equalization over desegregation at the college level, reprising a battle that Devlin notes he faced in Texas. 10 This suggests that a more dynamic relationship existed between the grassroots and the national NAACP than Devlin concedes, one closer to the relationship Thomas Sugrue finds in the school desegregation struggle in the North. Outside the South, Sugrue writes, “litigation and protest were never separate,” and local activists and national organizations such as the NAACP jointly “reshaped public policy, state by state, school district by school district.” 11
While Devlin establishes the significance of gendered ideals and female actors to the desegregation struggle, Pamela Grundy and Michelle Purdy underscore the necessity of viewing desegregation through the historical lens of the segregated schooling that preceded it. To a greater extent than Devlin, they probe the paradox that segregated schools and communities prepared and nurtured the black students who pioneered and endured desegregation. They do this through hyperlocal examinations of individual institutions. Purdy chronicles the desegregation of Atlanta’s historically white The Westminster Schools, which is one of the nation’s most prestigious private schools, while Grundy explores Charlotte’s historically black West Charlotte High School during segregation, desegregation, and resegregation.
As with African American students who desegregated public schools, the small number of black students who desegregated Westminster beginning in 1967 experienced isolation, harassment, and an unsupportive institutional culture. But Purdy contends that the gifts that those students brought with them—their “priceless black educational inheritance” (p. 18)—enabled them to succeed personally while advancing the broader struggle for equitable black educational opportunity. That inheritance stemmed from African Americans’ longstanding emphasis on literacy and education as vehicles for social mobility and liberation. Purdy places the segregated primary and secondary schools (both public and private) as well as the historically black colleges and universities that educated many of the parents of Westminster’s desegregation pioneers within this tradition. Since those students were born in the 1950s, Purdy notes that they were able to experience “a fully developed black educational world” that along with their families and communities nurtured the “culture, curiosity, confidence, talents, skills, and knowledge” (p. 46) that they put to use at and beyond Westminster.
Critics of desegregation might draw upon Purdy’s celebration of segregated black schooling to assert that desegregation’s disruption of this black educational world exacted an unnecessary toll. But Purdy does not draw this conclusion. Instead, she presents the desegregation of elite private schools—which currently enroll a mere 1 percent of American schoolchildren—as an extension rather than a contradiction of education’s historically central role in African American advancement. “While the very role of independent schools in U.S. life may be questioned,” Purdy writes, “black students and their families in the 1960s and 1970s continued to seek educational opportunities that might position them well in the larger society” (p. 160). As gateways to the upper reaches of American society, elite private schools were one of the many routes that African Americans chose as they sought full participation within an unequal society. What’s more, independent schools such as Westminster tilted toward racial inclusivity as resistance to desegregation continued and as those public schools that were desegregating neglected black students’ educational inheritances. Rather than resist until the federal government forced their hands through the revocation of tax-exempt status, some independent schools such as Westminster began slowly desegregating in response to pressure from African Americans and concerns about their image.
For urban historians, Purdy’s attention to the desegregation of independent schools provides a reminder that elite institutions with numerically limited reach are nevertheless valuable sites for understanding the workings of race and power within metropolitan America. Unfortunately, Purdy’s narrow focus on life within Westminster and the bureaucratic worlds of national independent school associations crowds out discussion of Atlanta’s racial politics and political economy. This blunts the book’s impact as an investigation into the role schools play as arbiters of opportunity and as forces of social change.
Similarly, while Purdy stresses the persistence of racism within American life, she does not fully discuss how and where schools such as Westminster fit within this broader web of structural inequality. This makes her potentially big story—about the capacity for individuals to change institutions and for institutions to change society—feel unnecessarily small. After noting in her epilogue that “a relatively small group of African Americans gained access to an elite institution,” (p. 180) Purdy turns her attention toward her book’s implications for building and addressing school culture. But readers will likely want to know more than she provides about her study’s broader significance for understanding race, education, democracy, and opportunity within urban America.
Grundy faces a similar challenge of drawing larger meaning from a study of a single school. Her challenge may even be greater since Color and Character joins a crowded field of studies on school desegregation in Charlotte, where the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) case authorizing cross-town busing for desegregation originated. 12 Much of the interest in Charlotte stems from Swann and the fact that the city’s schools became some of the most statistically desegregated in the nation. 13
As in Nashville, Louisville, and Tampa, desegregation in Charlotte involved the entire metropolitan region. City and county schools merged in 1960 as Charlotte’s annexation of adjacent suburbs eroded the Mecklenburg County tax base, and this consolidation meant that the district later evaded the limitations the Milliken v. Bradley (1974) decision imposed on metropolitan desegregation. 14 While Charlotte-Mecklenburg County closed or downgraded historically black schools in order to desegregate historically white ones, its desegregation of West Charlotte High School distinguished it from the majority of cities where desegregation was strictly one way. The school’s successful “experiment in true integration” figured prominently in Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s seminal 2005 essay on the “long civil rights movement,” which drew upon Grundy’s earlier research on West Charlotte to counter prevailing notions of the movement’s post-1965 decline. 15 Grundy’s tight and tender focus on the historically black school and its community in Color and Character expands upon this familiar story.
Mining more than eighty oral history interviews with West Charlotte graduates, teachers, parents, and administrators, Grundy examines the school from within. She presents its history as both a “portrait of human possibility” and a “cautionary tale” (p. 3) about the indirect and impermanent nature of social progress, and she stresses the need to understand schools within the context of their communities. She demonstrates that West Charlotte, which opened to black students in 1938, bolstered the city’s westside neighborhoods and the students who lived there during the Jim Crow era. When examining West Charlotte’s initial history as a black school, she details how its talented corps of educators created a caring and disciplined environment with high academic expectations and rich extracurricular offerings. She also shows how West Charlotte persisted and overcame the disruptions and dislocation that desegregation and urban renewal inflicted upon the city’s African American communities. Despite the loss of black teachers, racial violence, and discriminatory discipline against black students, Grundy contends that desegregation ultimately succeeded at West Charlotte because of its remaining black teachers’ leadership and its efforts to construct an inclusive community. Like Devlin, she stresses that the social goal of desegregation—“building new relationships with new groups of people” (p. 85)—mattered as much as its redistributive aims. But she also acknowledges the racial disparities in terms of academic outcomes and access to advanced classes that persisted within West Charlotte during desegregation.
The final third of Color and Character examines West Charlotte’s resegregation and the growing challenges it faced during its second run as an ostensibly black school. In Charlotte, the conservative political tilt of the 1980s culminated in a lawsuit that forced the school district to abandon its race-based student assignment plan in 1999. By 2002, 85 percent of West Charlotte’s students were black, and it and other predominantly black schools experienced greater teacher turnover, rising drop-out rates, and increased concentrations of impoverished students.
Grundy acknowledges the range of factors that contributed to these challenges, including the punitive turn in criminal justice policy, expanded residential segregation, and the stigmatizing effect of the school accountability movement. But she too often defers analysis to her largely middle-class informants. Like other interviewees, Mable Latimer, a 1952 West Charlotte graduate who returned to the school as a volunteer in 1997, noted a decline in community values over time. “There are some kids here, I call them off the hook because they are loud, boisterous, disrespectful, use terrible language and it’s unbelievable,” Latimer said in 2005. “When the mother comes in, she’s using the same thing” (p. 162). Rather than scrutinize the ways that some African Americans explained West Charlotte’s structural challenges in terms of personal behavior, as she does with white conservative politicians’ condemnations of “ghetto culture,” Grundy largely allows these interviewees to speak for themselves. As with Purdy’s work, the individual stories culled from oral history interviews occasionally outshine the analysis. This reflects a missed opportunity to examine how diverse understandings of educational inequality shaped—and limited—responses to it.
The question of how understandings of educational inequality influenced law and policy figures more prominently in Camille Walsh’s Racial Taxation. Walsh begins her investigation with the numerous lawsuits that black plaintiffs throughout the country filed against school segregation and inequitable funding during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While these plaintiffs regularly asserted their status as “taxpayers” to justify their demands for equal protection, the strategy often backfired. Even when siding with plaintiffs, Walsh contends, courts crafted rulings that laid a legal foundation for the unequal school funding that would persist for the next hundred years.
These opinions, which included the Supreme Court’s 1899 Cumming v. Board of Education of Richmond County decision that Augusta, Georgia, was not obligated to provide a high school for black students even though it provided one for whites, not only conflated “taxpayer” and “white” in ways that made the recognition of people of color’s citizenship and education rights highly contingent. They also advanced a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that did not establish education as a right.
Walsh maintains that these earlier cases are relevant to the history of desegregation given the ways post-Brown defenders of segregation used a rhetoric of “taxpayer citizenship” to incorrectly claim that white people were entitled to unequal preferential treatment since they paid taxes that African Americans consumed. She also argues that the failure of later decisions such as Swann to acknowledge the links between race and class built upon an already established “white legal consciousness that obscured class while hiding behind an imagined marketplace of citizenship” (p. 11). Specifically, Walsh notes that the Swann opinion suggested that school desegregation cases should not be used to address economic inequality or other “purposes beyond their scope” even as it approved busing for desegregation.
Walsh maintains that this turn weakened the already limited understanding of inequality evident both in Brown’s formalistic understanding of race as an independent category and its emphasis on psychological rather than material harm. Here, she provides a nuanced response to the questions raised by Devlin’s favorable reading of Brown’s emphasis on “hearts and minds.” Brown’s understanding of inequality, Walsh writes, “would prove to be both morally and historically compelling, as well as extremely slippery to rely on as legal precedent for litigating equality” (p. 80). Walsh concludes that these long simmering legal developments reached their apotheosis in San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), in which the Supreme Court upheld the inequitable distribution of school funds derived from local property taxes. Fundamental to that opinion were the Court’s contentions that class did not deserve the same level of constitutional scrutiny as race and that the funding inequities that existed between school districts resulted from market forces rather than state action. While Walsh distinguishes the communitarian taxpayer activism of Rodriguez’s Mexican American plaintiffs from the “taxpayer revolts” of the late 1960s and 1970s, she views the ruling as emanating from the same stew of ideas as those white revolts.
Walsh illuminates the complex and often maddening limitations of juridical understandings of inequality. But her explanation of their origins in notions of taxpayer citizenship deserve further scrutiny given her concession that “the identity of ‘taxpayer citizen’ did not have a legally important meaning” since “few cases in the twentieth century were won solely on the basis of taxpayer status claims” (p. 108). The shakiness of her assertions is also evident in the passive construction of her book’s central argument that the claim of “taxpayer” almost always has a hidden symbolic meaning premised in whiteness and has served as a currency of exclusion and inequality (whether supporting it or combatting it), particularly when that identity is deployed in discussions of the right to public education. (p. 4)
What exactly does it mean to be “premised in whiteness”? For whom has taxpayer identity “served as a currency of exclusion and inequality,” and who has deployed it in that manner in relation to public education? To be fair, Walsh partially answers these questions in the sections of her book dealing with African Americans demanding education based on their status as taxpayers and white self-identified taxpayers venting their anger over Brown in letters to the Supreme Court. But she places excessive emphasis on the importance of the “taxpayer citizen” in the rather ethereal “legal consciousness of citizenship” that she finds percolating throughout the long twentieth century. This leaves readers who are familiar with the links that urban historians have drawn between suburban homeownership and modern conservatism wanting more concrete connections between the concept of “taxpayer citizenship” and the daily work of policy and politics. 16
Matthew Delmont partially satisfies this craving by bringing Walsh’s valuable ideas about education and taxpayer rights down to earth in Why Busing Failed. Expanding upon Walsh’s dissertation, he details how the media legitimated opposition to “busing” that white segregationists couched in terms of their race-neutral rights as taxpayers. His consideration of taxpayer rhetoric, however, is but one aspect of a book that revises the story of desegregation’s decline as thoroughly as Devlin recasts its origins.
Building upon Matthew Lassiter’s work on the “myth” of de facto segregation, Delmont constructs a national narrative of desegregation and the school officials, courts, politicians, and media outlets who undermined it. 17 Perhaps, his most significant contribution is his exposure of “busing” as a fig leaf for racist support for segregation and as a metonym whose impact stretched far beyond its well-known associations with Charlotte, Boston, and Pontiac. 18 Tracing the origins of the northern “antibusing” movement to the 1950s rather than the 1970s, he shows how white protest impeded desegregation before it even started in earnest. He contends that these earlier protests against busing led Congress to effectively release northern schools from the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s desegregation requirements. Congress did so by distinguishing between the “racial imbalance” that existed throughout the North and the segregation by law that existed in the South. Here, Delmont further demonstrates why “white backlash” against the supposed excesses of the civil rights movement fails to explain desegregation’s demise.
In addition to singling out President Richard Nixon for his pivotal role in limiting busing for desegregation during the 1970s, Delmont stresses that the news media—TV news in particular—provided an important assist. He argues that news coverage that emphasized “busing” rather than desegregation obscured both the role that public officials played in creating segregation in cities such as Boston and the deeply rooted struggles that African Americans in those cities led in pursuit of equal educational opportunity. He contends that news outlets primarily did this by relying on a point–counterpoint style that drew a false equivalence between African American demands for constitutional rights and white opposition to desegregation. This approach left little room for the examination of historical context or nuance, including the varied ideas that black people had regarding the role that desegregation should play in addressing educational inequality. As Delmont shows, this misleading framing enabled policy enactments that dismantled desegregation and encouraged resegregation.
Delmont’s persuasive examination of the construction of a false “busing” narrative carries profound implications for dissecting political discourse in the “post-truth” era of Donald Trump. Most chilling are those moments when Delmont describes political leaders manipulating evidence in order to frame desegregation in a manner that justified either inaction or aggressive action to sustain inequality. Nixon was particularly effective in this regard, seizing the opportunity to frame the “busing” debate without media interference. He also tended to lean more heavily on sentiment than facts, as when he defended the “middle course” he claimed he was taking when he supported Mississippi school districts seeking to further delay desegregation fifteen years after Brown. “It seems to me that there are two extreme groups,” Nixon said in 1969. “There are those who want instant integration and those who want segregation forever” (p. 121). While Nixon’s comment essentially repeated remarks that Eisenhower had offered thirteen years earlier, both his methods and his message prefigured Trump. Viewing Trump’s media antics—his use of Twitter to sidestep journalistic middlemen, his 2017 assertion that “there’s blame on both sides” after a neo-Nazi killed a counterprotestor at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—suggests he is not an aberration. The problem, we can see, lies much deeper.
Desegregation is not the only aspect of history through which scholars can explore how racism, rhetoric, and raw political power have disrupted the pursuit of justice. But the works reviewed here reaffirm desegregation’s significance as an essential component in the broader and deeper history of inequality in metropolitan America and in the still larger story of America’s incomplete and imperiled struggle to establish democracy.
The history of desegregation also underscores why desegregation still matters for addressing educational inequality today. At the most practical (and cynical) level, it reminds us that in a society built upon white supremacy, resources are likely to flow to white people. What chances are there then for the equalization of resources and opportunity without attacking segregation?
At a more idealistic register, the history of desegregation asks contemporary Americans to consider the relationship between education and democracy. Located at the intersection of the state, the economy, and personal and collective aspirations, schools have long forged conceptions of public belonging and exclusion. While desegregation’s blemishes are easy to spot when historians hold a mirror up to its past, we would be foolish to look away. For all its flaws, desegregation offered an opportunity to construct a new understanding of the American public. How then can we create a truly inclusive public today without the desegregation of public spaces such as schools?
To be clear, school desegregation was and remains an insufficient mechanism for compensating black and Latinx people for past educational injustice. It also did not and will not independently eradicate educational or other forms of inequality, and it will require unwanted yet unavoidable compromises. But inequality and illiberalism will almost certainly fester in desegregation’s absence.