56 Years After Brown V. Board of Education: A Trend Towards Resegregation?

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56 Years After Brown V. Board of Education: A Trend Towards Resegregation?

Segregation is the separation of groups of people by custom or by law. It is often based on differences of race, religion, wealth, or culture, and can occur in almost any area of life. It is particularly evident in housing, education, and employment, and in the use of eating, sleeping, transportation, and other public facilities. In the United States, prior to 1954, there were 17 states which had legal segregation in their schools. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down the pivotal Brown v. Board of Education decision, announcing that de jure segregation was unconstitutional and illegitimate. This decision marked the beginning of an all-out attack on the entire structure of racially separate schools. During this period, the South moved from almost total racial separation to become the nation's most integrated region , due in large part to desegregation orders handed down by federal courts. The law developed in a series of decisions that required immediate and complete desegregation in states with a history of official discrimination, even when busing was required to overcome residential segregation. However, a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s helped push the country away from Brown's celebrated ideals and closer to the old idea of "separate but equal." Today, the

basic trend is toward the dissolution of these desegregation orders and a return to patterns of segregation. History Prior to the Civil War, public education was limited in most southern communities, and formal education for slaves was illegal. Many states enacted laws which made it a crime for AfricanAmericans to even be able to read, much less attend school alongside white classmates. The nation's first legal challenge to segregated schools took place in Massachusetts. In Roberts v. City of Boston, a black man named Benjamin F. Roberts sued to force the city of Boston to allow his daughter Sarah to attend the nearest elementary school, instead of having to travel across town to a segregated school. A young black attorney, Robert Morris, and Charles Sumner, who would later be the author of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, represented Roberts. Arguing before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Sumner discussed the psychological damage of segregation to young blacks. The case was unsuccessful because authorities reasoned that special provisions had been made for "colored" students to have a school. In 1930, the NAACP commissioned attorney Nathan Margold to produce a plan for a legal campaign against school segregation. The Margold Report proposed to attack the doctrine of separate but equal by challenging the inherent inequality of segregation in publicly funded primary and secondary schools. Charles Hamilton Houston , however, recognized the pervasiveness of racism and believed that the NAACP needed to first establish a series of legal precedents. He modified the Margold Report by beginning the NAACP's legal campaign with lawsuits for equal facilities in graduate and professional schools. In 1939, the NAACP created a separate, nonprofit organization called the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to bring cases in state and federal courts that continually challenged segregation and racial discrimination. One of the earlier cases under the Houston plan was Missouri ex. Rel. Gaines v. Canada. In this case, the Supreme Court forced the state of Missouri to admit a Black applicant to its law school, unless it was prepared to build a separate law school for blacks. The Court went one step further in Sweatt v. Painter when it ordered the University of Texas to integrate its law school. The Court held that a law school for blacks, already built rather than proposed as in Gaines, could never be equal to the established law school at the university. In recognizing the superiority of the established University

of Texas Law School, the Court noted several components of a legal education "which make for greatness in a law school," including number of the faculty, variety of courses and opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities. The Court also identified qualities which are incapable of objective measurement, including reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, a federal district court judge had ordered the University of Oklahoma to admit a black graduate student. Although the black student was admitted, he was segregated from the white students in the classrooms, cafeteria, and library. The Supreme Court found that such segregation in the school "impair[ed] and inhibit[ed] his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." The Court held that state-imposed restrictions which produce such inequalities could not be sustained. In 1951, a class action suit (Brown) was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs, who had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP, were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their twenty children. The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of Education under an 1879 Kansas law which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in twelve communities with populations over 15,000. As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and directed to the segregated schools. The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson. The three-judge District Court found that segregation in public education had a detrimental effect upon black children, but denied relief on the ground that the black and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers. The plaintiffs appealed to the United States Supreme Court, and on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court handed down a 9-0 decision which stated, in no uncertain terms, that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Brown in 1954 did not result in any immediate desegregation in the South, but called for admitting students to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with "all deliberate speed." This language was problematic for public school desegregation - it was vague and gave whites in the South a means to delay school desegregation. The plaintiffs in Brown, and blacks in the South, underestimated the will of whites to resist the law, even when it was decided by the United States Supreme Court. Instead of complying with the new law, whites all over the South began a massive resistance movement. One of the most drastic examples of massive resistance occurred in Virginia, when Prince Edward County closed its public schools in September 1959 rather than desegregate. The parents of white children were given tuition grants and advised to enroll their children in private schools. Prince Edward County also gave them tax credits to defray the costs of a private education. Blacks, on the other hand, were not given any financial support, and many black children were without a public education for as long as five years. The Warren Court did not provide guidance on the implementation of Brown until one year later in Brown v. Board of Education (Brown II). This decision gave federal district courts authority to determine when dual public school systems would be eliminated. Furthermore, Brown II gave local school districts and state authorities responsibility for implementing the decisions of the federal district courts on school desegregation. The decision also required these courts to monitor the implementation of their orders in public school desegregation cases. This grant of authority was just as problematic as the "all deliberate speed" language in Brown. Each school district had its own particular history of policies, political forces, issues in dispute, rulings, and compliance, and the meaning of unitary status likewise differed across districts. Desegregation The peak of the effort to desegregate schools came in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, federal education officials, the Department of Justice, and the courts all maintained strong and reasonably consistent pressure for achieving actual desegregation. It was also in this period that the South moved from almost total racial separation to become the nation's most integrated region. In 1972, the Nixon Administration promulgated the Emergency School Aid Act. This program was very popular with school authorities. It paid for a good deal of basic research on desegregated schools, and directed most of its funds to heavily burdened urban school districts.

Unfortunately, the Reagan Administration brought a rapid repeal of the federal desegregation assistance program and a shift in the Justice Department to a position of strong opposition to desegregation litigation. The Administration was of the opinion that desegregation had failed, and that existing desegregation orders should be cancelled after a few years. The Justice Department began to advocate such a policy in the federal courts in the mid-1980s. Trend Towards Resegregation Unitary Status The Supreme Court's 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County stated emphatically that segregated, or "dual," school systems could not meet the admonition promulgated in Brown unless racially identifiable schools were eliminated. The Court laid out several factors to be considered when determining a school system's segregation status, including student assignment, faculty and administrative staff hiring, assignment and promotion, student discipline, extracurricular activities, dropout and graduation rates, and special education. Three years later, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Court announced a presumption against schools that are substantially disproportionate in their racial composition. The Court also implied that court supervision, along with racial guidelines for schools, would not be a permanent state of affairs. Once deemed "unitary," a school district would not have to make continual adjustments to maintain racially balanced enrollments in its schools. The Supreme Court clarified what it meant to be deemed unitary in two decisions, Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell and Freeman v. Pitts. After a district has shown a good-faith effort to eliminate vestiges of past segregation and has satisfied the requirements of Green, the district can be declared unitary, after which any racial imbalance among its schools arising from residential segregation would be permitted. In Oklahoma City, the Court declared that school districts which had sufficiently implemented their court orders in the judgment of the local federal district court should be released from their order and should be free to resume assigning students to neighborhood schools that were segregated as the result of residential isolation. The Court concluded that a certain number of years of feasible desegregation strategies eliminated further desegregation rights of minority students. Under desegregation orders, it was a violation of the law to take actions that would have the foreseeable impact of restoring segregation. The Court announced that no such restriction remained

unless the school authorities said that their intent in adopting a policy was to foster segregation. The fact that segregation was the certain result of a policy which was said to be adopted for another purpose would be no barrier. Following the Oklahoma City decision and other Supreme Court decisions limiting desegregation rights, a number of the nation's large school districts began to initiate proceedings to end their desegregation orders. In other court challenges, the districts had no desire to end desegregation orders, but such actions were initiated by individual white or Asian parents or, in several cases, by a judge who took the initiative to clear his or her docket. Although the federal judges usually delayed implementation of desegregation for years and often ordered limited plans that had to be expanded through appeals, a number acted on their own initiative and with considerable speed in terminating desegregation orders. Declarations of Unitary Status Since 1995, 45 school districts across the country have been declared unitary and have had their federal desegregation orders rescinded by courts. Once a district has been declared unitary, individual white parents can sue to try to prevent any conscious effort to maintain desegregation in any school, claiming that it discriminates against whites. Courts of Appeals in some parts of the country have been especially active in terminating desegregation plans, including recent decisions on cases in Charlotte, North Carolina and Rockford, Illinois. Both of these cases involved a situation in which either the school district itself or the trial judge or magistrate judge had found the desegregation process to be incomplete but the Court of Appeals ordered termination of the plan. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Swann began in 1965, when a group of African-American parents sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board in Federal District Court, contending that the board was continuing a segregated school system. In response, the board adopted a freedom of choice plan, which was approved by the Federal District Court and the 4th Circuit. In affirming the desegregation plan in 1971, the Supreme Court made it clear that court-ordered desegregation was a remedy to end the de jure segregation and its vestiges, not an end in itself.

In 1997, a group of white parents sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board in Federal District Court, claiming (among other things) that CMS had become a unitary system. The court ruled that CMS had achieved unitary status and had eliminated the vestiges of de jure desegregation to the extent practicable. The majority found that any racial imbalances in student assignments resulted from demographic changes rather than from actions taken by CMS, finding that "CMS has complied in good faith with the mandate of Brown embodied in the district court's desegregation orders to achieve a unitary system." The Court further stated that any remaining problems were not "vestiges of the former de jure system and therefore do not have constitutional implications...we are confident that de jure segregation is history." Rockford School System In 1989, a group of plaintiffs filed suit against the Rockford Board of Education (People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ.), charging that it had intentionally discriminated against black and Hispanic students. The district court found that the board had indeed engaged in intentional discrimination, and a desegregation order was entered. Both the school district and the minority student interest group challenged the decree. The court of appeals held that the provision which required a set percentage of the school district's teachers to be minorities was improper because there was no finding of discrimination against the school district's teachers. The decree was also improper because its provisions imposed a racial disciplinary quota among students, limited minority enrollment in remedial education programs, and forbid the use of tracking or the practice of grouping students according to their abilities. According to Circuit Judge Posner's opinion, taxpayers in Rockford incurred costs of $238 million to comply with the valid provisions of the 1996 decree. As a result of the improvements enabled by this large expenditure, and a policy of allowing parents to choose which public school to send their kids to, Posner found that the school district had succeeded in desegregating its schools. According to Posner, the purpose of a desegregation order is to eliminate the consequences of segregation. "When [those consequences] have been eliminated, the decree has done its job and should be lifted." Posner found the schools desegregated, even though minority educational achievement lagged behind that of whites. He credited this uneven academic achievement to many other factors, including poverty, parents' education and employment, family size, parental attitudes and behavior, prenatal, neonatal, and child health care, peer-group pressures, and ethnic culture. He

admits that some of these factors may be due to or exacerbated by discrimination, but found that the school board had no legal duty to remove those vestiges of societal discrimination. Partial Unitary Status The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University compiled a listing of 35 published unitary status rulings between 1990-2002. Of those cases, no request for unitary status was denied. For those school districts that were still operating a school system with vestiges of segregation, a finding of partial unitary status was created as a way to end the courts' jurisdiction for those areas in which the school district was no longer operating a dual system. Alexander City Board of Education This longstanding school desegregation case began in 1963 when the plaintiffs, a class of black students, sought relief from race discrimination in the operation of a de jure segregated school system. A desegregation plan for the Alexander City School System was filed on December 4, 1969. On February 12, 1997, the district court entered an order stating that the parties should move toward unitary status and termination of the litigation. The court ordered the parties to confer to determine (a) whether, in any of the areas set forth in Green, the defendants have achieved unitary status and, if so, whether the court may relinquish jurisdiction as to these areas; (b) whether there are other areas as to which the plaintiff parties claim that the defendants have not eliminated the vestiges of prior de jure segregation; and (c) whether the parties can amicably develop a procedure through which the school system can achieve unitary status. On May 20, 1998, the court approved a consent decree detailing the areas of operations in the Alexander City School System in which the district was partially unitary and those in which further remedial action was necessary. The school district was found to have achieved unitary status in the areas of transportation and facilities. The areas identified for further remediation were: student assignment within schools and instruction; faculty hiring, assignment and promotion; administrative hiring, assignment and promotion; student discipline; extracurricular activities; dropout and graduation rates; and special education. The parties agreed that in order for the district to attain unitary status in these remaining areas, the board would undertake certain actions, including developing policies and procedures in the identified areas to eliminate the remaining vestiges of the dual system. On May 1, 2002, the Alexander City Board of Education filed a motion for declaration of unitary status and termination of the litigation. Most objections pertained to the district's perceived failure to hire and promote black faculty and staff, including the failure to promote black faculty members to administrative positions.

Other objections pertained to special education, racial disparities in student discipline, instances of different treatment of black students as compared to white students, and the prohibitively high cost of some extracurricular activities. The court found that the Alexander City Board of Education had met the standards entitling the school district to a declaration of unitary status and termination of this litigation in all areas except for the hiring and promotion of higher level administrators. With the exception of those areas, the court's jurisdiction ended and control over the Alexander City School System was returned to the Alexander City Board of Education. Little Rock School District The Little Rock School District (LRSD) in 1930 was a de jure segregated school district operating under the "separate but equal" doctrine. In accordance with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown , which overturned Plessy, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas ordered implementation of a plan to admit a small number of African-American students to Little Rock Central High School in September of 1957. Arkansas Governor Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard troops at Central High to place it "off limits" to African-American students, but the troops were subsequently removed after the issuance of an injunction by United States District Judge Ronald Davies in Aaron v. Cooper. Nine courageous African-American students entered Central High on September 23, 1957, in the face of a large, threatening mob of whites. Finally, President Eisenhower dispatched troops to Central High to ensure the safety of the African-American students and to enforce the desegregation order. Desegregation plans were advanced by the Little Rock School District in the decade of 1960 in a good faith effort to provide a solution to continuous litigation and the failure of those plans in the hysterical political atmosphere of that period. In 1966, the Eighth Circuit approved LRSD's "freedom of choice" desegregation plan, which remained in effect through the 1968-69 school year. In Green, the Supreme Court held that school districts such as LRSD, which were the product of de jure segregation, could not satisfy their constitutional obligations under "freedom of choice" plans. Therefore, LRSD formulated a new desegregation plan for the 1969-70 school year that was based on geographic attendance zones. However, because segregated housing patterns created a number of racially identifiable schools under the plan, the Eighth Circuit found it to be unconstitutional.

In the 1971-72 school year, LRSD began cross-town busing to achieve racial balance in grades 6 through 12. The following school year, cross-town busing was used to achieve racial balance in grades 4 and 5. Finally, during the 1972-73 school year, all LRSD schools and all LRSD grade levels were racially balanced. On July 9, 1982, although United States District Judge William R. Overton found that LRSD was operating "as a completely unitary desegregated school system," he made a number of findings that raised serious questions about the future prospects for LRSD remaining an integrated school district. There had been a steady trend of increasing black enrollment and decreasing white enrollment in the elementary schools, and to a lesser extent in the upper grades. LRSD proceeded to develop a "controlled choice" desegregation plan, which was approved by Judge Woods on February 27, 1987. In 2002, LRSD petitioned the court to declare the school system unitary. The court found evidence established that the school district had substantially and satisfactorily complied with its obligations in five of the six challenged areas of school desegregation plan, namely, good faith, student discipline, extracurricular activities, advanced placement courses, and guidance counseling. The district was therefore entitled to declaration of unitary status in those five challenged areas. The school district had not substantially complied with its obligations under the provision of the school desegregation plan which required it to annually assess academic programs in order to determine the effectiveness of the academic programs in improving African-American achievement, and therefore the court would continue supervision and monitoring of district's compliance with that section of the plan. The court concluded, "the time has arrived for substantial control of LRSD to be returned to the hands of the citizens of this community and for LRSD to be declared partially unitary." Other factors that lead to resegregation Circuit Judge Posner, in People Who Care, mentioned several factors besides intentional acts by the school districts that influence the racial imbalance in schools. The one main factor is residential segregation. Because students traditionally attend schools in the neighborhoods where they live, most schools have remained segregated - not because the law requires it, but because of where people live. There are many reasons for the formation of these segregated neighborhoods, including racism, legal segregation, and economic disparity.

Housing patterns Housing patterns are dictated by real estate agents, banks, and city zoning decisions. Often, real estate agents do not show blacks homes in white neighborhoods, while banks often refuse to loan money to blacks moving into white neighborhoods. City planners often keep neighborhoods segregated through decisions on where to locate streets, interstate highways, access ramps to those highways, and even subway and other rail stations. School siting While formal segregation in schools disappeared, public officials often create school districts designed to keep blacks and whites separated. In one example, Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, dissenting Judge Diana Gribbon Motz blamed the trend of resegregation in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools partly on what she called "school siting." In her opinion she stated, "While racial imbalance in student assignments might result from housing patterns that reflect the collective private choices of Mecklenburg County residents, those choices could well result from the school board's decisions about where to locate new schools... the board's pattern of school construction could have facilitated or even hastened white flight to the suburbs." In the 30 years since the Supreme Court approved of race-based "mathematical ratios" for student assignments and of court-ordered busing as remedies for de jure segregation , the CharlotteMecklenburg School System has built twenty-five of twenty-seven new schools in predominantly white suburban communities. The Board's school siting policies could well evidence its lack of political will in the face of pressure to abandon desegregative policies -- pressure from families who "are concerned about the racial composition of a prospective school and [who] will make residential decisions accordingly." Suburbanization Suburbanization also increased de facto segregation, as whites increasingly left the cities for suburban communities. In 1968, only two major American cities - Washington and Charleston - had black majorities. By 1990, more than 15 cities were predominantly black, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Richmond. Self-segregation

Self-segregation undoubtedly plays a role in residential segregation. Many blacks choose to live in neighborhoods with other blacks, just as whites often choose to live with other whites. Blacks who did integrate neighborhoods in both the North and the South often faced violence and intimidation. Studies show that blacks do not have a preference to live exclusively together, or to self-segregate themselves from white people. The data suggests that the main cause of residential segregation is the direct result of black belief that white people don't want them as neighbors, and the prejudice and preference of white residents not to want them as neighbors. Economic disparity Economics and access to jobs compound race-conscious decisions by individuals and governments. Discrimination in hiring means that blacks earn less than whites, and therefore have less money for housing. Thus, even where blacks have access to better housing in integrated neighborhoods, most cannot afford to move there. Even though the 1980s witnessed an economic gap between the black poor and the black middleclass, the relocation of middle-class blacks from the urban ghetto was not into integrated communities, but rather into the segregated areas within middle-class neighborhoods. A study of New York City suburbs identifies the reality of American segregation, concluding that blacks and Hispanics of the same socioeconomic class as whites typically live in communities with less tax wealth, lower ownership rates, and higher poverty crime rates. Thus, increased housing costs generated by the practices of exclusionary zoning disproportionately affect African Americans and other minorities, virtually ensuring the continued patterns of racial segregation in American cities and suburbs. Despite the legal ban against discrimination in housing, an increasing black middleclass with the means to integrate, and a series of court decisions prohibiting racially motivated ordinances, our neighborhoods persist in remaining racially separate and unequal. Policy Recommendations We are clearly in a period when many policymakers, courts, and opinion makers assume that desegregation is no longer necessary, or that it will be accomplished somehow without need of any deliberate plan. Polls show that most white Americans believe that equal educational opportunity is being provided. National political leaders have largely ignored the growth of segregation in the 1990s. Thus, knowledge of trends in segregation and its closely related inequalities are even more

crucial now. Educational policy decisions that do not take these realities into account will end up punishing students in inferior segregated schools. There needs to be active discussion and leadership on this issue by the President and leaders of the Department of Education and Justice Department. These leaders should study the trends and consequences of segregation throughout the nation, and be prepared to offer up policy changes to remedy the resegregation that the nation's schools are facing. There should also be leadership by the Justice Department and the Office for Civil Rights in defining standards for "unitary status" which specify how the various legal requirements of desegregation should be factually examined. This educational expertise should also be used to help the courts better understand the decisions that they are making when asked to terminate a school district's desegregation orders. When a school district petitions the court to terminate its desegregation order, there needs to be a more aggressive defense and a higher standard that the school district must meet. There should be an effort by the Administration, as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to foster more diverse communities. This would include research on successful local practices that create integrated communities and vigorous enforcement against housing market and lending practices that spread segregation. Conclusion In 1954, the United States Supreme Court concluded that school segregation was unconstitutional and inherently unequal. However, the last decade has seen a reemergence of this unconstitutional and inherently unequal separation of races in our schools. This trend is often dismissed because people believe that nothing can be done. However, when the federal courts where implementing desegregation orders, along with a policy of strict enforcement, segregation was actually decreasing throughout the nation. Until the current Administration recognizes the rate at which our schools are regressing, decides to make policy changes to encourage desegregation, and requires the federal courts to strictly enforce those outstanding desegregation orders, the schools in the United States will be headed back to those unconstitutional, inherently unequal schools of the past.

References The African American Journey: Segregation, World Book, at http://www.worldbook.com/wc/popup?path=features/aajourney&page=html/bh059.html&direct=y es (last visited May 22, 2006). Ask Earl Yahooligans, at http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/content/ask_earl/page?d=20040701 (last visited May 22, 2006). Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Gary Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, July 2001, pg. 3. Gary Orfield and John T. Yun, Resegregation in American Schools, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, June 1999, pg. 5. Richard C. Hunter, Administration of Court-Ordered School Desegregation in Urban School Districts: The Law and Experience, Journal of Negro Education, Summer 2004, at 1. Segregation and Inequality, Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#Segregation_and_inequality (last visited May 22, 2006). Segregation in the United States, MSN Encarta, at http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefArticle.aspx?refid=761580651 (last visited May 22, 2006). Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198 (Mass. 1849). Brown v. Board of Education Orientation Handbook, at http://www.brownvboard.org/research/handbook/prelude/prelude.htm (last visited May 22, 2006). The NAACP Targets Higher Education, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, at http://americanhistory.si.edu/Brown/history/3-organized/higher-education.html (last visited May 22, 2006).

With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty, The Library of Congress, at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-segregation.html (last visited May 22, 2006). Missouri ex. Rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938). Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950). McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Educ., 339 U.S. 637 (1950). Brown v. Board of Education, Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education (last visited May 22, 2006). Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 98 F. Supp. 797 (D. Kan. 1951). Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Brown v. Bd. Of Educ., 349 U.S. 294 (1955). Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor, Federal Oversight, Local Control, and the Specter of "Resegregation" in Southern Schools, Duke University, January 2005, pg. 20. Green v. County School Bd. Of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968). Selected Unitary Status Rulings between 1990-2002, available at http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/reseg03/appendices.pdf#search='selected%20u nitary%20status%20rulings' (last visited May 22, 2006). Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 402 U.S. 1 (1971). Bd. of Educ. of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237 (1991). Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467 (1992). Damien Jackson, Here Comes the Neighborhood: Charlotte and the resegregation of America's public schools, In These Times Independent News, December 20, 2002 at http://inthesetimes.com/issue/27/04/feature1.shtml.

Benjamin Dowling-Sendor, Searching for the Right Balance, American School Board Journal, at http://www.asbj.com/2002/07/0702schoollaw.html (last visited May 22, 2006). People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ. 246 F.3d 1073 (2001). People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ., 111 F. 3d 528 at 534 (1997). See http://www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights United States v. Alexander City Board of Education, 2002 WL 31102679 at *1 (2002). Little Rock School District v. Pulaski County Special School District, 584 F.Supp. 988 (2002). Aaron v. Cooper, 156 F.Supp. 220 (E.D.Ark.1957). Clark v. Bd. of Educ. of Little Rock, 426 F.2d 1035, 1043 (8th Cir.1970). Clark v. Bd. of Directors of Little Rock School District, 328 F.Supp. 1205, 1209, 1214 (E.D. Ark.1971), rev'd in part, 449 F.2d 493 (8th Cir.1971). Clark v. Bd. of Educ. of Little Rock, 465 F.2d 1044, 1046 (8th Cir.1972). People Who Care v. Rockford Bd. of Educ. 246 F.3d 1073 (2001). Travis Gosa, Residential Segregation in Shepardstown, West Virginia, available at http://tgosa01.www6.50megs.com/Residential%20Segregation.htm (last visited May 22, 2006). Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd. of Educ., 269 F.3d 305 (2001) See Peter Dreier, America's Urban Crisis: Symptoms, Causes, Solutions, 71 N.C. L. REV. 1351, 1370 (1993). See Dennis R. Judd, Segregation Forever?, THE NATION, Dec. 9, 1991, at 740, 742. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid-Segregation and the Making of the Underclass 1, 36 (1993)

Published by Bettina Roberts Flood

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