Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education ended systemic segregation in public education, many schools are returning to their Jim Crow past.
Hundreds of school districts nationwide have been released from court-ordered integration mandates, resulting in "rapid and continual resegregation" as poorer black children find themselves attending almost exclusively-black schools, the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica reports today.
The story focuses on a Tuscaloosa high school that a decade ago was held up as a model of successful integration and today is 99 percent black.
The challenge of integration is familiar territory for Alabamians. Across the state, 43 school systems remain under some form of federal oversight for desegregation.
AL.com has reported the ongoing saga of one of the state's largest systems still under court order. Huntsville City Schools earlier this year elected to fight the U.S. Department of Justice, seeking an end to 44 years of federal oversight. The district and federal officials have been in negotiations regarding zoning.
Huntsville last month argued in court the law has changed over time, allowing for racial isolation by housing patterns, and the Justice Department arguments haven't kept up. "Contrary to the apparent belief of the United States, this is not 1963 or 1970," reads a Huntsville brief from last month.
The changes at Tuscaloosa's Central High School, like those at some other schools where integration has been rolled back, were in part the result of an attempt to stop "white flight," or the loss of white students to private or suburban schools, ProPublica reports in its story that also appears in The Atlantic.
After a successful bid to end federal oversight at Central in 2000 school leaders in Tuscaloosa, with the tacit approval of black community leaders, created new neighborhood schools they hoped would help balance the ratio of black and white students.
The hope was that the move would ease the concerns of white parents alarmed by a growing ratio of black-to-white students, keeping more white families in the system. It didn't work.
"In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened," ProPublica reports.
That integration is still an issue in Alabama schools will not come as a surprise to many here. Alabamians have grown up living in the history of the civil rights movement, and recent 50-year anniversaries of 1963 milestones put the struggle in the spotlight again.
The University of Alabama made national news in 2013 when the student newspaper reported that adult advisors to two sororities blocked the acceptance of a black student because of her race, 50 years after Gov. George Wallace's attempt to block integration with the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door." This year the university's student government shelved a resolution calling for integration of the Greek system.
In its report, which is headlined "Segregation Now" in a nod to Wallace's pro-segregation proclamation in his 1963 inaugural address, ProPublica notes that achievement and the quality of education declines as a school's black population increases. In the old, integrated Central, the achievement gap between black and white students was closing.
[ Read ProPublica's report, "Segregation Now" ]
Watch the ProPublica video report here:
Examine the racial profile of Alabama public schools by adjusting the ethnicity percentage slider and hovering over the dots in this interactive map from AL.com. For details on schools grouped by system, search the database below:
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