Desegregate Segregation

Efforts to desegregate neighborhoods can be traced back to the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. In recent times, in an attempt to both reduce overcrowding and segregation, the NYC Department of Education presented a plan to rezone the Upper West Side. In a similar display of rage as those opposed to Brown v. Board Education demonstrated, parents threatened to take legal action to stop this plan. Parents from the well off neighborhoods were unwilling to give up the schools that they were entitled to due to their choice of residence, but this came at the cost of the children from the other neighborhoods that are consistently disadvantaged by disparities in the quality of schools. Efforts to rezone neighborhoods to achieve

Ferguson Court case decision that made it illegal for blacks and whites to share public spaces such as schools, and made them “separate but equal.” However, as the Court held in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, separate education is inherently unequal and inevitably worse for the minorities. De jure segregation was then targeted by the Court by requiring desegregation where segregation was law. However, in the North segregation was de facto and was therefore not pressured by law to desegregate. The 1974 Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court decision required desegregation in states where de jure segregation was not in place only if they could prove that racially discriminatory acts were causing the segregation. This was difficult to prove and consequently not as forcefully enforced as it was in southern states. Desegregation policy has not had as large of an effect in northern states and this can explain the persistence of extreme racial segregation that exists in these states and cities today which legitimizes the need for efforts such as zoning in places like the Upper West Side of

According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2011-12, only 1.9% of schools that are 0-10% black and Latino have 91-100% poor students. In sharp contrast, 50.8% of schools that are 91-100% Black and Latino have 91-100% poor students, so the more segregated the schools are, the starker the difference in the SES of the majority of it’s students. Not only are these students racially and economically isolated, but their education is radically different than what one in a suburb would experience. In “Still Separate, Still Unequal” Kozol visits schools in urban centers in present day. Kozol writes that society treats segregation as something of the past, but he names schools in cities such as Cleveland where schools are 97% black and the graduation rate is only 35%. Schools such as these are often overcrowded, teachers are paid less than average and undertrained, and facilities such as bathrooms are often lacking or in poor conditions. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol writes in detail about the concentrated black community of East St. Louis. The conditions here are a prime example of the ghettos of the mid 20th century that Rothstein described; there is an abundance of liquor stores and prostitute houses, is often plagued by raw sewage, does not have regular garbage pickup, and is polluted by nearby power plants. Also like