This past June, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared integration plans in Louisville and Seattle unconstitutional because of their focus on race as one factor in assigning students to schools. The Court's ruling in the "Parents Involved in Community Schools" v. "Seattle School District No. 1" and…

The November 13, 2009 Conference of the National Coalition on School Diversity brought together more than 300 people from across the nation. This included parents, teachers, school administrators, local and state elected leaders, long time civil rights advocates, community organizers, and government officials. Participants engaged in a…

This article explores the legacies of the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" Supreme Court decision within the historical context of race relations in the United States. The pursuit by African Americans to exercise their rights of citizenship is described as influenced by the changing face of fear. The Supreme Court decisions that…

The racial desegregation of the student bodies of historically white universities in South Africa has had significant political implications for student politics and university governance. I discuss two key moments in the governance history of the University of Cape Town (UCT) critically. The first involves the experience of racial parallelism in…

This article reports on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down two voluntary school-integration plans in a 5-to-4 ruling issued last week. Its decision left solidly intact its precedents dealing with affirmative action in higher education. Rather than signaling any clear desire to revisit its past decisions on race-conscious admissions…

Attempts to demonstrate why the public schools in Berkeley, California could be successfully desegregated. Describes some of the facets of the Berkeley desegregation model and the characteristics of the school system that made it amenable to desegregation. (MK)

Few people have been more involved in shaping postwar U.S. education reforms--or dissented from some of them more effectively--than Chester Finn. Assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, Finn has also been a high school teacher, an education professor, a…

The race-based neighborhood projection hypothesis holds that in choosing neighborhoods, people care less about present racial composition then expectations for future neighborhood conditions. Using data linking households to their neighborhoods, the paper estimates exit and entry models and constructs a simulation model that predicts racial change…

This article describes how Alan Newton has put his life back together after he was set free. Before he came to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, Newton spent 22 years locked up in 12 different New York state prisons for a crime he did not commit. His ordeal began when a White woman who had been raped in the Bronx mistakenly identified the…

This paper, by the president of West Virginia University (WVU), discusses the impact of the Brown decision on that institution and on higher education in general. Following the Gaines decision of 1938, WVU adopted a policy of admitting Black students to its graduate and professional schools because advanced educational programs were not available…

Examines cases of residential desegregation and the effects it has on school desegregation. (MK)

Overviews the history of school desegregation in Akron, Ohio. Discusses a recently decided court case in which parents from Akron alleged that intentional segregated housing patterns contributed to school segregation. (MK)

The experiences of African American professors reach back nearly 150 years beginning with their pioneering efforts to educate Africans in Liberia. With the gradual racial integration of the American professoriate in the post-World War II era and the redoubled effort of the federal government and private agencies, along with the support of colleges…

Describes Black participation in the history, governance, and activities of the United Automobile Workers Union. Calls for organized labor in general to support more actively equal employment for Blacks and to make a greater commitment to economic equality and progress. (GC)

Discusses how as states push historically black public colleges to do more to recruit white students, colleges seek effective strategies and some educators see a double standard. (EV)