Challenging the Legacies of Racial Resentment

Black Health Activism, Educational Justice, and Legislative Leadership

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351529563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Domestic and international health activism and health policy are focal points in this volume, a publication of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. This work demonstrates the continuing importance of the "medical civil rights movement, " through examples of activism of women of colour in AIDS service organizations, of their health issues, and of the struggle for racial equity in health care in Brazil.Spikes in police and vigilante violence, as well as fear of a reversion to resegregated schools have brought a new urgency to black political activism. The contributors explore the effect of race on American attitudes toward immigration policy and reform, black state legislators and American morality politics, the historically disproportionate influence of Southern whites in American politics, and the undermining of school desegregation laws with "nullification" strategies. The volume's Trends section features conversations on the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Los Angeles, the 2016 presidential election, and examines the teaching of the Trayvon Martin story at the University of California, Irvine. The volume also includes a diverse selection of book reviews.

All but Overturned: America's Nullification of Brown v. Board of Education

Albert L. Samuels^*

Southern University A&M College

Abstract

Six decades have passed since the Supreme Court's holding in Brown v. Board of Education declared “separate educational facilities for the races are inherently unequal.” Yet, the educational landscape for still far too many Black and Latino school children more resembles Plessy v. Ferguson. Years of resistance to the letter and spirit of Brown in various forms culminated with a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s that released scores of local school districts from court-mandated desegregation orders. These political and legal battles over desegregation and busing are often understood as part of the “Southern strategy” utilized by Republicans to appeal to the racial resentments of white voters who traditionally voted Democratic. This essay, by drawing parallels to the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, argues that the so-called Southern strategy is not a mere by-product of “white backlash” to the civil rights movement. Rather, the Nullification Crisis is the crucible for a uniquely American reactionary political tradition that opposes the ideal of multiracial democracy. Thus, America's “nullification” of Brown represents the norm, not the exception, to the pattern of American history with respect to race.

Keywords: Desegregation; Southern strategy; Nullification

Introduction

A citizens’ group in the unincorporated, southeastern part of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, has drawn national attention to itself by its effort to incorporate a new city after failing in the last two legislative sessions to win authorization to create a separate independent school district. The proposed city—which would be named “St. George”—will, if created, instantly become the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana with over 107,000 residents. An economic study commissioned by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce reports that a wide disparity exists between the per capita income of the residents of St. George and the city of Baton Rouge, the state's capital: the average per capita income of St. George residents is over $88,000 while the average per capita income of Baton Rouge residents stands at over $58,000—a $30,000 difference.¹ Over 70% of the population of the proposed city of St. George are white; by contrast, 55% of the residents who live within the city limits of Baton Rouge are Black compared to 40% who are white. National headlines have portrayed the incorporation campaign as an effort by the white, more affluent residents of Baton Rouge to leave behind their poorer Black neighbors and keep their local taxes for themselves. Supporters of the incorporation effort bitterly resent the implications of this charge, countering that they simply want more control over their tax dollars and a better education for their children than what the public schools in Baton Rouge are currently providing (Ashtari 2013; Samuels 2013).

The protestations of the St. George activists aside, one thing is clear: during the 1970s and 1980s, any proposal to create a breakaway school district would have been unthinkable because it would have conflicted with federal desegregation court orders and mandates. However, in the last two decades, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have been increasingly willing to release local school districts from the requirements of long-standing federal desegregation orders, especially those that require mandatory, crosstown busing as part of the remedy. This has occurred despite the continued persistence of racial segregation in these school districts. As Whites have steadily moved from central cities to the suburbs over the last several decades, urban school districts have become increasingly Black and Latino and often poor (Ravtich 2013; Reardon et al. 2012; Orfield et al. 2012; Lopez 2007; Perea 2004; Samuels 2004; Mickleson 2001).

These trends have intensified despite decades of court-ordered busing, magnet schools, cooperative efforts between inner city and suburban schools, special programs, and increased funding for central city schools. By these recent decisions, federal courts are saying that the current levels of racial segregation in the nation's schools—in contrast to the period of official racial segregation during the “Jim Crow” period—are not the fault of local officials. Rather, the resilience of racial segregation in public schools is merely the by-product of the freewill choices of individuals as to where to live, work, and go to school. Consequently, the current generation of school boards and their leaders should no longer be punished for the sins of their fathers.

Moreover, the increased racial isolation of inner city schools has occurred alongside the growth of an impoverished urban underclass who (along with a host of other challenges) often find themselves saddled with decidedly inferior educational opportunities than children who grow up in more affluent neighborhoods and communities. This result is particularly worrisome given the overwhelming social science consensus linking poverty to academic underachievement in the classroom (Ravitch 2013; Reardon et al. 2012; Orfield et al. 2012; Frankenberg and Orfield 2012; Mickleson 2001; Orfield 1996). Additionally, as populations move even further from the central core of metropolitan areas, older suburban neighborhoods are experiencing signs of similar decline that have previously characterized inner cities (Ravitch 2013; Frankenberg and Orfield 2012; Orfield et al. 2012; Wilson 1997, 1987, 1978; Kozol 2012, 2006; Massy and Denton 1998). Despite these developments, there is little reason to believe that those who decry this state of affairs can expect much relief from the federal judiciary. Instead, it appears evident that the courts have concluded that school desegregation has largely been a failed social experiment and have resolved that it is time for the nation to move on.

These developments seem a far cry from the original objective of Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483 [1954]). In Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that separate educational facilities for Black and White Americans, which were required by law in over a dozen Southern states in the Union, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. “Separate educational facilities,” the justices wrote, “are inherently unequal.” However, as our nation commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the Brown decision, the ideal of equal educational opportunity for all still remained an elusive goal for far too many minority children in the United States.

This essay argues that the means by which Brown’s ideals have been frustrated in practice can be more accurately described as a manifestation of the doctrine of nullification—a doctrine explicitly articulated by US Senator John C. Calhoun in the context of the political controversy surrounding the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832. I begin by tracing the legal and political path that the nation has embarked upon since the initial Brown decision, with particular emphasis on the confluence of factors which conspired to blunt the noblest aspirations of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling. This paper also documents the changing racial and ethnic demographic trends that characterize the modern public education system and the implications of the trend toward racial and economic isolation of students of different ethnic identities on the nation's economic competitiveness. Thirdly, this essay argues that the extent to which the reality of public education falls short of the ideal first announced in Brown v. Board of Education is not an isolated event. Specific examples from American history where the rights of African-Americans are sacrificed on the altar of states’ rights and federalism litter the historical record. This reality forces a re-examination of the significance of contemporary trends of growing racial segregation in public schools. Finally, this paper concludes that the process of resegregation can take place while provoking seemingly little moral cognitive dissonance within egalitarian American ideals.

The Resegregation of American Public Education

Though the Brown decision occurred in 1954, real progress toward substantial desegregation of America's public schools did not begin in earnest until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Enraged by a Supreme Court ruling that they considered to be an attack on “their way of life,” Southern members of congress, governors, state legislatures, and citizens’ groups mobilized in a determined effort to defy Brown outright or, failing that, to delay or minimize its impact for as long as possible. Their defiance, combined with a predominately lackluster enforcement effort by the federal government (with rare exceptions), largely explains why only 2.3% of southern black children were enrolled in desegregated classrooms in 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown (Wilkinson 1979). Eventually, the US Supreme Court grew weary of the stalling techniques of Southern states and issued more forceful rulings—Green v. School Board of New Kent County,² Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education,³ and Swan v. Charlotte Mecklenberg Board of Education⁴—to move beyond “token integration” toward more substantial racial desegregation of public schools. These decisions, coupled with a greater willingness of the federal government to use its enforcement powers pursuant to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965,⁵ finally overcame the massive resistance campaigns of the Jim Crow South against school desegregation (Wilkinson 1979; Rosenberg 1991; Halpern 1995; Samuels 2004). During the 1968–1969 school year, 77.8% of Black school children in the South attended schools with minority enrollments of 90% or higher. By contrast, during the 1980–1981 school year, 57.1% of Blacks attended schools where racial minorities constituted 50% or greater of the student body, and the figure of Blacks enrolled in schools where 90% or more of the population was Black had fallen to 23.7%, a drop of over fifty percentage points from the same statistic twelve years earlier (Orfield et al. 2012, 34). In 1973, the Supreme Court in Keyes v. School District No. 1,⁶ “nationalized” the Brown mandate by holding that school districts without an explicit history of state-mandated racial segregation in public education could still be held liable of violating Brown if courts find evidence of de facto racial segregation in the public schools within their jurisdictions. Keyes is significant for another reason: because of the large numbers of Latinos within the Denver school system who were found to be receiving substandard education when compared to White students, the Court affirmed for the first time that they, like African-Americans, also have a constitutional right to equal educational opportunity.

Keyes, as it turned out, represents the “high water mark” for federal enforcement of school desegregation. The US Supreme Court led the federal retreat with respect to school desegregation by following Keyes with a series of decisions that would significantly hamper the capacity of lower federal judges presiding over local desegregation cases to craft and implement effective remedies. In Milliken v. Bradley,⁷ the Court by a 5–4 margin struck down a Detroit metropolitan school desegregation decree because it included the outlying (and overwhelmingly White) suburban districts in the plan. The lower courts had held that a Detroit-only plan could not lead to a significant level of desegregation because the city's school system was already 65% Black. However, the majority ruled that, absent a judicial finding of liability in the outlying suburbs (which were not parties to the lawsuit), the lower courts’ rulings exceeded their remedial powers when they ordered an interdistrict remedy. Thus, in striking down the desegregation plan that the lower courts had ordered in the Detroit case, the Supreme Court left the district court with the one remedy that it had already held would not work. The ruling also reflected the public mood of the country: public opinion surveys indicated that close to 90 percent of White Americans favored neighborhood schools over crosstown busing; high-profile busing controversies in large Northern metropolitan areas such as Detroit and Boston provided clear evidence that opposition to desegregation was not merely a Southern phenomenon. However, whites were not alone in their opposition to court-ordered busing: in fact, busing was opposed by a sizable segment of the black community.⁸

In addition to Milliken, the Supreme Court made three additional rulings—two of which did not concern school desegregation per se—that would have the effect of turning the mandate of Brown into an elusive ideal. One year before Milliken, the Supreme Court held in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez⁹ that school children in economically impoverished school districts had no federally protected constitutional right to equity in public financing for their education with the children blessed to attend schools in wealthier districts. The Court ruled that Texas’ system of public school finance, which relies primarily on local property taxes to fund public schools, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution despite the fact that wealth disparities between rich and poor citizens created a substantial chasm between the funding of the San Antonio Independent School District and the nearby wealthy suburb of Alamo Heights. Three years later, the Supreme Court in Pasadena Board of Education v. Spangler¹⁰ ruled that school districts were not required by the Constitution to make annual adjustments of the racial composition of their student bodies if the changes were the result of shifting demographic patterns within their communities. Specifically, the justices emphatically rejected the district court's insistence that there be no school “with a majority of minority students,” setting aside the view that the absence of numerical parity among the races constituted prima facie evidence of constitutional violations on the part of the district. That same year, in Washington v. Davis,¹¹ the Court held that plaintiffs alleging job discrimination on the basis of race had to prove that their employers acted with discriminatory intent in order to win their cases: in other words, a showing that the decisions of employers had a disproportionate and discriminatory impact on minority employees would not suffice to prove that Title VII¹² of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause had been violated.

Collectively, these rulings would cripple the effort to realize the goals of Brown v. Board of Education in several ways. First, since Whites had been moving in ever-increasing numbers from the central cities to suburbs since the end of World War II, Milliken diminished t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Fmchapter
• Content Page
• Editors’ Note
• Research Articles
• Black State Legislators and Morality Politics
• Civic Engagement Is a Process: Lessons from a First-Year Public Administration Course
• Crossing the Mason Dixon versus the Rio Grande: Evaluating the Effect of Race on Attitudes toward Immigration Policy
• All but Overturned: America's Nullification of Brown v. Board of Education
• Charting a Path toward Racial Health Equity in Brazil: Health Activism, the State, and Policy Development
• The Limits of Emancipation: Black Americans and White Southern Dominance of American Politics from the Founding to the Twenty-First Century
• Black Women Take Their Health into Their Own Hands: The Het Heru Healing Dance and Auset Qigong
• Learning from the Doers: Women of Color AIDS Service Organizations and Their Understanding of Intersectionality
• Trends: The Pedagogy of Black Politics
• “Planting the Seeds of Our Future” in Action: A Conversation with Melina Abdullah
• A Conversation on the 2016 Presidential Election with Robert Smith and Melanye Price
• “Teaching Trayvon” at Irvine: On Feminist Praxis, Afro-pessimism, and “Woke Work”
• Book Reviews
• Adryan Wallace review of What's Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Belonging in Britain by Tracy Fisher
• Mary Phillips review of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War by Dayo Gore
• Joe Rollins review of Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law by Sora Y. Han
• Brandon R. Byrd review of The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa by Robert Trent Vinson
• Dan Royles review of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS by Dagmawi Woubshet
• Brooks Kirchgassner review of What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought by Lewis R. Gordon
• T. Tu Huynh review of Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City by Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
• Brandy Thomas Wells review of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 by Cheryl Higashida
• Jasmin A. Young review of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by Erik S. McDuffie
• Christopher Cameron review of At the Cross: Race, Religion, and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty by Melynda J. Price
• Walter D. Greason review of Pulse of the People: Political Rap Music and Black Politics by Lakeyta M. Bonnette
• A Note on Passing: Cedric Robinson
• A Note on Passing: Savannah Carroll
• A Note on Passing: Otis Madison
• A Note on Passing: Jerry Watts
• A Note on Passing: Michael Mitchell
• Invitation to the Scholarly Community