Southern Schools Are Resegregating

Last month, a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama, ruled that the predominately white suburb of Gardendale will be allowed to form its own school district, splintering from the more diverse Jefferson County district. Gardendale’s plan, Judge Madeline Haikala declared, was motivated by race: Indeed, it “assails the dignity of black schoolchildren.” But she authorized the split. U.W. Clemon, who represented black plaintiffs in the case, told the Washington Post that the ruling damages more than 50 years of integration efforts.

The decision made national headlines, but it’s part of a wider pattern of school resegregation throughout the South, which once boasted the most integrated schools in the country. Federal rulings and enforcement that began a decade after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision paved the way for this incredible advancement: By 1980, the share of Southern black students in “intensely segregated schools”—those in which students of color comprise 90 percent or more of the student body—had decreased from almost 80 percent to 23 percent.