The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) avoided federal oversight to comply with the desegregation ruling for nearly 30 years after "Brown v. Board of Education" by establishing a neighborhood concept for school attendance boundaries. "Jenkins v. Missouri" ended in 1995 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to…

At many U.S. universities, the tendency to self-segregate has become a familiar and accepted occurrence, evident in a wide array of college settings including housing and social gatherings, classes and training events, protests, and grievance sessions, and even separate commencement events. In many ways, this trend represents a return to the…

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled schools in the United States needed to desegregate and begin integration. The decision was a radical departure from the facilities argument initially presented; it added the issue that the segregation of Black students was having a deleterious effect on their self-concept. Many scholars argue the integration has…

Reflecting on his own experiences attending integrated schools in the 1960s and 70s, scholar Pedro Noguera argues that, despite the challenges involved, school integration remains essential for providing better educational opportunities for students. At a time when our nation is becoming irreversibly more diverse, Noguera writes, the country's…

Public schools have always been meant to provide all children with the skills and knowledge to become successful participants in the economy. But currently, a second important purpose of public education has become more salient: to promote social cohesion in a diverse and fractured democracy. As ugly and naked racism in America is further…

This research is an ethnography (Murchison, 2010) that describes the lived experiences of a university professor and former public school superintendent. The work explores racial integration and desegregation of America's public school system. Through a series of seven semi-structured interviews, background information has been collected about the…

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the "acting white" slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness,…

This paper provides an anecdotal account of racial relations and integration efforts in West Virginia before and after the Brown decision, from the perspective of the publisher of the "Charleston Gazette," The struggle for racial equality in West Virginia has been filled with contradictions. The first legal action taken in West Virginia…

Explores one southern community's response to the 1954 Brown decision, its subsequent handling of school desegregation, and events immediately following the decision, which provide a context for the 1980s decision to consolidate the community's middle school students to reduce perceptions of race-based inequality. Analyzes the current status of…

This paper examines the history of the desegregation movement in public education in order to understand a desegregation case in Saint Louis, Missouri. The first section provides information on desegregation litigation over the years, beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895 and examining in detail the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education…

This paper describes some of the race discrimination issues in education that are most pressing 40 years after the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision and offers ways in which lawyers and educators can help address such discrimination. The following race discrimination issues in education are likely to produce conflict: (1) the use of…

Author Derrick Bell is not alone in wondering why "Brown v. Board of Education" commands such "awe and respect" in a nation where racial and ethnic groups remain separate and unequal in its public schools. Indeed, the ethnic disparities in academic achievement, the resegregation of public schools, and the ever-widening…