School segregation in the United States
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Part of a series of articles on Racial segregation |
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School segregation in the United States began in its de jure form with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the American South in the late 19th century. It is influenced by the history of southern states as slave societies, patterns of residential segregation, and later school choice programs, and Supreme Court rulings regarding previous school desegregation efforts.
The formal segregation of blacks and whites in the United States began with the passage of Jim Crow laws following the end of the Reconstruction Era in 1877. These laws, which were most prevalent in the South but also were passed by state legislatures in the Southwest and Midwest, segregated blacks and whites in all aspects of public life, including attendance of public schools. Jim Crow laws did not exclusively apply to the segregation of whites and blacks; in Texas, for instance, Mexican-Americans, along with blacks, were prohibited from sharing schools, restaurants, churches, and other public spaces with whites. In some areas, Native Americans were classified with blacks and similarly excluded from white facilities.
While African Americans faced de jure segregation in civil society, Mexican Americans who lived in southwestern states often dealt with de facto segregation; no laws explicitly barred their access to schools or other public facilities. Additionally, the proponents of Mexican-American segregation were often those officials who worked at the state and local school level; they often defended the creation and sustaining of segregated "Mexican schools". The obstacles for Mexican Americans was not greater than for blacks. At times the NAACP had to challenge segregation policies in institutions where exclusion was targeted only at African-American students, when there was an already established Mexican-American presence.
The constitutionality of Jim Crow laws was upheld in the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that separate facilities for blacks and whites were permissible provided that the facilities were of equal quality. The fact that separate facilities for blacks and other minorities were chronically underfunded and of lesser quality was not successfully challenged in court for decades. This decision was subsequently overturned in 1954, when the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregation in the United States. In the decade following Brown, the South resisted enforcement of the Court’s decision. States and school districts did little to reduce segregation, and schools remained almost completely segregated until 1968, after Congressional passage of civil rights legislation. Desegregation efforts reached their peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the South transitioned from complete segregation to being the nation's most integrated region.
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