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Overview
The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision.
Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment.
Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
The subtitle of tells it all. While school desegregation-and thus interracial contact-increased for a few decades after the pivotal Brown decision, "contrary forces restrained the extent of this increase," writes Clotfelter, who teaches public policy, economics and law at Duke University. Those forces include the tendency for whites to avoid racially mixed schools, the private school option, predominantly white "tracking" or extracurricular activities, school officials willing to gerrymander attendance zones and the Supreme Court's 1974 decision to limit the scope of desegregation. Clotfelter draws on a deep range of documents, including private school information, to make his case. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
May 17, 2004, marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that desegregated public schools. Clotfelter (Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy, Duke Univ.) here considers the consequences, showing that Brown's aim-the mixing of students of various races-has not been achieved. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the nation, Clotfelter goes beyond previous studies on the failure of school desegregation since the Supreme Court's 1954 decision by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown. He carefully calculates segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounts for private schools, presents recent information on segregation within schools, and measures segregation in college enrollment. The results, shown here, can be viewed as a sort of arithmetical history of Brown. This is an important book, with thorough analysis supported by both historical and current data. Clotfelter's angle of vision, measuring the lack of interracial contact, is both insightful and informative. Recommended for all types of libraries.-Samuel T. Huang, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.American Journal of Sociology
After Brown is an unusually comprehensive and well-documented analysis of trends in the last five decades in the levels of segregation in American education. . . . It is the most current, most comprehensive reference work available today.— John R. Logan
The Nation
[A] richly instructive 'arithmetical history' of how educational integration waxed and then waned in the years after Brown.— David J. Garrow