It will be sixteen years this May since the Supreme Court decreed in Brown v. Board of Education that the races may not be segregated by law in the public schools, and six years in July since the doctrine of the Brown case was adopted as federal legislative and executive policy in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet here we are, apparently struggling still to desegregate schools in Mississippi, Louisiana and elsewhere in the deep South, and still meeting determined resistance, if no longer much violence or rioting.

The best figures available indicate that only some 23 percent of the nationwide total of more than six million Negro pupils go to integrated public schools. About half the total of more than six million Negro pupils are in the South, and there the percentage of Negroes in school with whites is only 18.

What has gone wrong? The answer is, both less and a great deal more than meets the eye; it is true both that the school desegregation effort has been a considerable success, and that it has not worked.

The measure of the success is simply taken. Sixteen years ago, local law, not only in the 11 Southern states but in border states, in parts of Kansas, in the District of Columbia, forbade the mixing of the races in the schools, and official practice had the same effect in some areas in the North, for example portions of Ohio and New Jersey. Ten years ago, Southern communities were up in arms, often to the point of rioting or closing the public schools altogether, over judicial decrees that ordered the introduction of a dozen or two carefully selected Negro children into a few previously all-while schools. There are counties in the deep South that still must be reckoned as exceptions, but on the whole, the principle of segregation has been effectively denied, those who held it have been made to repudiate it, and the rigid legal structure that embodied it has been destroyed. That is no mean achievement, even though it still needs to be perfected and completed, and it is the achievement of law, which had irresistible moral force, and was able to enlist political energies in its service.

The achievement is essentially Southern. The failure is nationwide. And the failure more than the achievement is coming to the fore in those districts in Mississippi and Louisiana where the Supreme Court and a reluctant Nixon Administration are now enforcing what they still call desegregation on very short deadlines. In brief, the failure is this: To dismantle the official structure of segregation, even with the cooperation in good faith of local authorities, is not to create integrated schools, anymore than integrated schools are produced by the absence of an official structure of school segregation in the North and West. The actual integration of schools on a significant scale is an enormously difficult undertaking, if a possible one at all. Certainly it creates as many problems as it purports to solve, and no one can be sure that even if accomplished, it would yield an educational return.

School desegregation, it will be recalled, began and for more than a decade was carried out under the so-called “deliberate speed” formula. The courts insisted that the principle of segregation and, gradually, all its manifestations in the system of law and administration be abandoned; and they required visible proof of the abandonment, namely, the presence of black children in school with whites. The expectation was that a school district which had been brought to give up the objective of segregation would gradually reorganize itself along other nonracial lines, and end by transforming itself from a dual into a unitary system.

All too often, that expectation was not met. The objective of segregation was not abandoned in good faith. School authorities would accept a limited Negro presence in white schools, and would desist from making overt moves to coerce the separation of the races, but would manage nevertheless to continue operating a dual system consisting of all black schools for the vast majority of Negro children, and of white and a handful of nearly white schools for all the white children. This was sham compliance—tokenism it was contemptuously called, and justly so—and in the past few years, the Supreme Court, and HEW acting under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, determined to tolerate it no longer.

HEW and some lower federal courts first raised the ante on tokenism, requiring stated percentages of black children in school with whites. Finally they demanded that no school in a given system be allowed to retain its previous character as a white or black school. Faculties and administrators had to be shuffled about so that an entirely or almost entirely black or white faculty would no longer characterize a school as black or white. If a formerly all-Negro school was badly substandard, it had to be closed. For the rest, residential zoning, pairing of schools by grades, some busing and majority-to-minority transfers were employed to ensure distribution of both races through the school system. In areas where blacks were in a majority, whites were necessarily assigned to schools in which they would form a minority. All this has by no means happened in every school district in the South, but it constitutes the current practice of desegregation. Thus among the decrees recently enforced in Mississippi, the one applicable in Canton called for drawing an East-West attendance line through the city so that each school became about 70 percent black and 30 percent white. Elsewhere schools were paired to the same end.

It bears repeating that such measures were put into effect because the good faith of school authorities was in doubt, to say the least, and satisfactory evidence that the structure of legally enforced segregation had been eliminated was lacking. But whatever, and however legitimate, the reasons for imposing such requirements, the consequences have been perverse. Integration soon reaches a tipping point. If whites are sent to constitute a minority in a school that is largely black, or if blacks are sent to constitute something near half the population of a school that was formerly white or nearly all-white, the whites flee, and the school becomes all or nearly all-black; resegregation sets in, blacks simply changing places with whites. The whites move, within a city or out of it into suburbs, so that under a system of zoning they are in white schools because the schools reflect residential segregation; or else they flee the public school system altogether, into private and parochial schools.

It is not very fruitful to ask whether the whites behave as they do because they are racists, or because everybody seeks in the schools some sense of social, economic, cultural group identity. Whatever one’s answer, the whites do flee, or try to, whether in a Black Belt county where desegregation has been resisted for 16 years in the worst of faith and for the most blatant of racist reasons, or in Atlanta, where in recent years, at any rate, desegregation has been implemented in the best of faith, or in border cities such as Louisville, St. Louis, Baltimore or Washington, DC, where it was implemented in good faith 15 years ago, or in Northern cities where legal segregation has not existed in over half a century. It is feckless to ask whether this should happen. The questions to ask are whether there is any way to prevent the whites’ fleeing, or whether there are gains sufficient to offset the flight of the whites in continuing to press the process of integration.

To start with the second question, a negative answer seems obvious. What is the use of a process of racial integration in the schools that very often produces, in absolute numbers, more black and white children attending segregated schools than before the process was put into motion? The credible disestablishment of a legally enforced system of segregation is essential, but it ought to be possible to achieve it without driving school systems past the tipping point of resegregation—and perhaps this, without coming right out and saying so, is what the Nixon Administration has been trying to tell us. Thus in Canton, Mississippi, a different zoning scheme would apparently have left some all-black and all-white schools, but still put about thirty-five percent of black pupils in schools with whites.

We live by principles, and the concrete expression in practice of the principles we live by is crucial. Brown v. Board of Education held out for us the principle that it is wrong and ultimately evil to classify people invidiously by race. We would have mocked that principle if we had allowed the South to wipe some laws formally off its books, and then continue with segregation as usual, through inertia, custom, and the application of private force. But substantial, concrete changes vindicating the principle of the Brown case were attainable in the South without at the same time producing the absurd result of resegregation.

This argument assumes, however, that the first of the two questions posed above is also to be answered in the negative. Is there, in truth, no way to prevent resegregation from occurring? Approaching the problem as one of straight feasibility, with no normative implications, one has to take account of an important variable. It is relatively simple to make flight so difficult as to be just about impossible for relatively poor whites in rural areas in the South. There is little residential segregation in these areas, and there is no place to move to except private schools. State and local governments can be forbidden to aid such private schools with tuition grants paid to individual pupils, and the Supreme Court has so forbidden them. Private schools can also be deprived of federal tax exemption unless they are integrated, and a federal court in the District of Columbia has at least temporarily so deprived them. They can be deprived of state and local tax aid as well. Lacking any state support, however indirect, for private schools, all but well-to-do or Catholic whites in the rural and small-town South will be forced back into the public schools, although in the longer run, we may possibly find that what we have really done is to build in an incentive to residential segregation, and even perhaps to substantial population movement into cities.

On a normative level, is it right to require a small, rural and relatively poor segment of the national population to submit to a kind of schooling that is disagreeable to them (for whatever reasons, more or less unworthy), when we do not impose such schooling on people, in cities and in other regions, who would also dislike it (for not dissimilar reasons, more or less equally worthy or unworthy)?* This normative issue arises because the feasibility question takes on a very different aspect in the cities. Here movement to residentially segregated neighborhoods or suburbs is possible for all but the poorest whites, and is proceeding at a rapid pace. Pursuit of a policy of integration would require, therefore, pursuit of the whites with busloads of inner-city Negro children, or even perhaps with trainloads or helicopter-loads, as distances lengthen. Very substantial resources would thus be needed. They have so far nowhere been committed, in any city.

One reason they have not is that no one knows whether the enterprise would be educationally useful or harmful to the children, black and white. Even aside from the politics of the matter, which is quite a problem in itself, there is a natural hesitancy, therefore, to gamble major resources on a chase after integration, when it is more than possible that the resources would in every sense be better spent in trying to teach children how to read in place. Moreover, and in the long view most importantly, large-scale efforts at integration would almost certainly be opposed by leading elements in urban Negro communities.

Polls asking abstract questions may show what they will about continued acceptance of the goal of integration, but the vanguard of black opinion, among intellectuals and political activists alike, is oriented more toward the achievement of group identity and some group autonomy than toward the use of public schools as assimilationist agencies. In part this trend of opinion is explained by the ineffectiveness, the sluggishness, the unresponsiveness, often the oppressiveness of large urban public school systems, and in part is bespeaks the feeling shared by so many whites that the schools should, after all, be an extension of the family, and that the family ought to have a sense of class and cultural identity with them. And so, while the courts and HEW are rezoning and pairing Southern schools in the effort to integrate them, Negro leaders in Northern cities are trying to decentralize them, accepting their racial character and attempting to bring them under community control. While the courts and HEW are reassigning faculties in Atlanta to reflect the racial composition of the schools and to bring white teachers to black pupils and black teachers to white ones, Negro leaders in the North are asking for black principals and black teachers for black schools.

Where we have arrived may be signaled by a distorted mirror image that was presented in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville decentralized experimental school district in New York during the teachers’ strikes of the fall of 1968. A decade earlier, black children in Little Rock and elsewhere in the South were escorted by armed men through white mobs to be taught by white teachers. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968, white teachers had to be escorted by armed men through black mobs to teach black children.

Can we any longer fail to acknowledge that the federal government is attempting to create in the rural South conditions that cannot in the foreseeable future be attained in large or medium urban centers in the South or in the rest of the country? The government is thus seen as applying its law unequally and unjustly, and is, therefore, fueling the politics of George Wallace. At the same time, the government is also putting itself on a collision course with the aspirations of an articulate and vigorous segment of national Negro leadership. Even if we succeed at whatever cost, in forcing and maintaining massively integrated school systems in parts of the rural South, may we not find ourselves eventually dismantling them again at the behest of blacks seeking decentralized community control?

There must be a better way to employ the material and political resources of the federal government. The process of disestablishing segregation is not quite finished, and both HEW and the courts must drive it to completion, as they must also continually police the disestablishment. But nothing seems to be gained, and much is risked or lost, by driving the process to the tipping point of resegregation. A prudent judgment can distinguish between the requirements of disestablishment and plans that cannot work, or can work only, if at all, in special areas that inevitably feel victimized.

There are black schools all over the country. We don’t really know what purpose would be served by trying to do away with them, and many blacks don’t want them done away with. Energies and resources ought to go into their improvement and, where appropriate, replacement. Energies and resources ought to go into training teachers, and into all manner of experimental attempts to improve the quality of education. The involvement of cohesive communities of parents with the schools is obviously desired by many leaders of Negro opinion. It may bear educational fruit, and is arguably an inalienable right of parenthood anyway. Even the growth of varieties of private schools, hardly integrated, but also not segregated, and enjoying state support through tuition grants for blacks and whites alike, should not be stifled, but encouraged in the spirit of an unlimited experimental search for more effective education. Massive school integration is not going to be attained in this country very soon, in good part because no one is certain that it is worth the cost. Let us, therefore, try to proceed with education.

Source: Alexander M. Bickel, “Desegregation: Where Do We Go from Here?” New Republic, February 7, 1970, 20–22.