The historical record reveals that in the final opinion of the landmark school segregation case "Cooper v. Aaron," the U.S. Supreme Court justices intentionally used the term "desegregation" rather than "integration" to soften the ire of those opposed to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision. The…

In 2012, Denver Public School District superintendent Tom Boasberg wrote to his employees about the state of their schools: "Yet there's a great deal of work ahead because our gaps still aren't closing at all. They remain strikingly and distressingly similar to the national data. Our schools still aren't the equalizing force that they need to…

This investigation employs the deconstruction techniques of Jacques Derrida to critique the Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 Supreme Court decision which segregated the Public Schools. Overturned by Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka 1954, Plessy's racist message reverberates today in the cultural divide, in right-wing media, in politics, and in…

Background/Context: School segregation scholarship underlines that litigation challenging the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas schools stressed their legal racial identity as white. "The other white race strategy," as scholars call it, granted Mexican Americans the right to access resources designated for the country's…

In the late 1930s, the NAACP launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. Using newly collected county panel data spanning three decades, this paper first documents heterogeneous within-state impacts of the campaign on teacher salaries. In states that reinforced…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

Ten years ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down two local school board initiatives meant to reverse extreme racial segregation in public schools. The sharply divided 5-4 decision in "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District" marked the end of an era of efforts by local authorities to fulfill the promise…

"Roberts v. City of Boston" is a well-known legal case in the history of US education. In 1847, the Boston School Committee denied Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old African American girl, admission to the public primary school closest to her home. She was instead ordered to attend the all-black Abiel Smith School, about a half-mile walk…

This paper explores two previously unstudied court challenges brought by black settlers in the territorial and early statehood period of Oklahoma (1889-1907). Oklahoma Territorial courts heard more challenges to segregated schools than in any state as these black pioneers challenged new legislation that segregated previously integrated territorial…

According to a report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project (2017), New Jersey is the sixth most segregated state for Black students and the seventh most for Latino students. Black and Latino students in New Jersey also attend schools with large percentages of low-income students. Volumes of research on school segregation show that students attending…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

Since the Supreme Court's 2007 "Parents Involved" decision, school districts have been pursuing integration in more legally and politically charged environments. The retreat of the federal government in the racial integration of schools is well documented, but less understood is what local school districts are doing to fill that void.…

There is not much debate regarding the "Brown" decision and the significance of the foundation it provided for access to equal educational opportunity and the school funding litigation movement; however, it is important to recognize that the inception of "Brown" can be traced back to a small rural town in South Carolina. Three…

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If…

The Law School at South Carolina State College, a black college located in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was founded in 1947 as a segregated school to keep black students out of the state's all-white law school. However, this small law school produced in its nineteen-year existence a generation of attorneys whose education and achievements outlived…