RACE, LAW, AND THE DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS, by Peter William Moran. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004. 316pp. Hardcover. $70.00. ISBN: 1-59332-039-6.

Reviewed by Christopher Malone, Department of Political Science, Pace University.  Email:  cmalone [at] pace.edu

Last year the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION  (1954) was met with both high praise for the original decision and a plethora of works on the mixed results of school desegregation in these intervening years. Charles Ogletree’s ALL DELIBERATE SPEED, Derrick Bell’s SILENT COVENANTS, and Sheryll Cashin’s THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION, all published in time for the commemoration, immediately spring to mind. Yet, in 2005 considerably less attention was paid to the fiftieth anniversary of the no-less important follow-up decision, commonly referred to as BROWN II. The two cases are of course inextricably linked. On the other hand, they could not be more different in their tone or how they have been perceived. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s lengthy and eloquent opinion in BROWN I has forever been reduced to one crystallizing ideal. “We conclude that in the field of public education,” Justice Warren writes, “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” By contrast, his brief decision for a unanimous court in BROWN II came to embody the fragmented and deeply ambiguous nature of integration attempts that would follow: “[T]he cases are remanded to the District Courts to take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.”

Much has been made of the hollow phrase “with all deliberate speed” – many argue that what happened in the aftermath of BROWN II was in fact all deliberation and no speed. What seems to be clear, now a half-century after BROWN II, is that the time for the noble but deeply flawed attempt at school integration has passed us. A school system once structured on the principle of de jure segregation is now equally rife with de facto segregation. In the field of public education, we have come full circle: the “separate but equal” educational facilities Justice Warren and a unanimous court decried fifty years ago are now de facto a way of life in much of the United States.

How we arrived at this point has been addressed many times over by constitutional historians, political scientists and policy experts, legal scholars, urban sociologists and political geographers. But Peter William Moran, an Assistant Professor of Elementary Education at the University of Wyoming, provides us with something in RACE, LAW, AND THE DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS that few scholars have: a rare, incredibly in-depth longitudinal [*1026] analysis of one city’s struggles to integrate its school system in the wake of the BROWN I and BROWN II decisions and their progeny.

Some scholars approach school desegregation with a bird’s eye view, scanning the landscape of American democracy in the second half of the twentieth century and giving us the expanse of the big picture. Moran is a mole, burrowing deep into the inner workings of the central administration of the Kansas City, Missouri, Board of Education as it struggled to comply with facts on the ground and the decisions of the Court, from the 1950s until the district was released from court order in 1999. The result is simply an excellent case study of the intricate dynamics of school integration carried out in one small corner of the country over a period of nearly fifty years. It is a must read for anyone remotely interested in the subject, but especially those education policy junkies hooked on the minutia of school desegregation.

Rarely does Moran allow the reader to step out of the shadows of the Kansas City Board of Education and its dealings with local parents, activists, and grassroots organizations, all of whom were seeking their policy preferences on integration. But there is a larger context lurking in the background to his work – two in fact, both arising from the original BROWN decisions.

The first originates from BROWN II. It should be recalled that Chief Justice Warren expanded on his “with all deliberate speed” formula when he wrote the following:

While giving weight to . . . public and private considerations, the courts will require that the defendants make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance with our May 17, 1954, ruling. Once such a start has been made, the courts may find that additional time is necessary to carry out the ruling in an effective manner. The burden rests upon the defendants to establish that such time is necessary in the public interest and is consistent with good faith compliance at the earliest practicable date. To that end, the courts may consider problems related to administration, arising from the physical condition of the school plant, the school transportation system, personnel, revision of school districts and attendance areas into compact units to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis, and revision of local laws and regulations which may be necessary in solving the foregoing problems.

Warren’s mandate is the jumping-off point for Moran’s work. As he explains in his introduction, “I focus on the manner in which [the Kansas City Board of Education and the district’s central administration] fashioned and re-fashioned integration policy in light of multiple and continuing evolving social, political, financial, demographic and legal considerations”(pp.3-4). BROWN II and its progeny were legal decisions, but, as Moran shows, legal considerations are never divorced from political, social and economic reality. Thus, the tragic story of desegregation in Kansas City cannot be told without understanding 1) the changing legal landscape, 2) the changing demographic landscape of the larger metropolitan area, 3) the changing socioeconomic and ethnic makeup of the students themselves, and 4) the concomitant [*1027] fiscal fortunes and misfortunes the district endured.

Moran weaves all of these strands together with mastery. While the text is thick and rich with day-to-day accounts of the major and minor players in this 50-year tale, the narrative is nonetheless straightforward, focused and easy to follow. He proceeds chronologically in nine succinct chapters, beginning with the first attempts to dismantle the dual system in Kansas City immediately in the wake of the BROWN decisions, and ending with the dismissal of the case by District Judge Dean Whipple in November 1999 – after forty years of attempts at integration, twenty years of legal oversight by the courts, and $2 billion spent on ensuring the vestiges of racial discrimination were eradicated.

Between 1954 and 1999, the Board of Education of Kansas City – like most urban areas – attempted every remedy at its disposal to ensure equal educational opportunity. Moran takes the reader through the ins and outs of each: neighborhood schools, transfer policies, rezoning of school district lines, busing, mandated taxes by the courts to provide equal facilities, and litigation to incorporate surrounding suburbs to achieve racial balance in the wake of increasing white flight. All of these attempts ultimately failed as the school board faced changing legal, political, financial, and socioeconomic terrain. At the end of the century the Kansas City school system barely resembled that of five decades before. Moran explains:

In 1954, Kansas City’s segregated schools were more than 80% white, enrolled about 60,000 students, and offered arguably the finest public education available in the metropolitan area. . . . Moreover, Kansas City students attended classes in some of the finest facilities in the area . . . By 1999, the Kansas City public schools enrolled 31,200 students, approximately 80% of whom were minorities, and the general perception of the Kansas City schools was much less favorable. Whereas fifty years earlier, the school system was an institution in which most Kansas City residents took pride, in 1999, Kansas City was the only unaccredited school district in the state of Missouri (pp.277-278).

The turnaround Moran describes in the Kansas City school system is striking but far from surprising. Such trends are reflected across the country. By the year 2000, for example, nearly one-third of all black students attended schools in which 90% of the student population was nonwhite. Classically, sociologists have been able to measure segregation by looking at the probability that a black student will have white classmates. In the 1990s, every region of the country became more segregated than in the past. In the northeast, the problem was most egregious: the probability that a black student would have a white classmate was 25%. Nationally the probability stood at 32% – down from 35% in 1990 (Rosen 2000).

Moran points to many mistakes on the part of the Board which all derive from the realities of the situation. Yet, not surprisingly he identifies the one issue which lay at the core of the problem. “Indeed, it can be argued,” he states, “that the great failure of the Kansas City public schools in the last half of the twentieth century was the inability of the school officials and the public school system to deal effectively with racial concerns”(p.279). That “racial concerns” should be the overarching dilemma in [*1028] effectively dismantling school segregation is somewhat tautological. But to his credit, Moran describes meticulously in the concluding chapter how race played out in the district. Yet, this brings us to the second context that forms the backdrop to RACE, LAW AND PUBLIC SCHOOL DESEGREGATION that Moran does not address but which also lurks in the background to what happened in Kansas City and indeed, the rest of the country, in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Let us return for a moment to the BROWN I decision. Quoting from a witness in the lower court, Justice Warren gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law” (emphasis added).  There is something conspicuous about this assumption which guided desegregation policy for the next fifty years – both in Kansas City and the rest of the country. The assumption is this: segregation had a detrimental effect only on colored children; hence, the way to rectify the problem was to ensure that colored children would go to school with whites. Otherwise, feelings of inferiority would persist.

It is rather odd that Warren, or anyone else for that matter, would not consider the detrimental effects of segregation on white children and make note of it in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in history. But perhaps that is beside the point here. What is important is that the policy of integration flows from this fundamental belief that educational equality for blacks could only come when schools were sufficiently integrated with white students – even if whites were unwilling to integrate at any cost.

The lengths to which whites would go in order to ensure that schools would not be fully integrated underwrites just about everything in Moran’s account of the case of Kansas City. Such is the detrimental effects of segregation on white children in 1950s America, and everything from housing policy to the creation of the suburbs, to the development of the interstate highway, is essentially a product of that one fact. It should be added that not everyone – certainly not every black leader – agrees that in order to elevate the educational opportunity of black children one needs to send them to school with whites. Separate schools for black children was advocated by Prince Hall in Boston in the 1790s, by W.E.B. Dubois at the dawn of the twentieth century, even to an extent by Martin Luther King in 1959 when he questioned how black children could be placed in the hands of white educators who may ultimately view blacks as inherently inferior. One even sees vestiges of this separatist argument in some of Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinions.

Certainly these are larger philosophical questions which go beyond the scope of Moran’s wonderful account of what takes place in Kansas City from 1954-1999. But they nonetheless get to the heart of the dilemma of school integration and the problems associated with it. We are left in the lurch: between a failed integration policy and the reality that some type of segregation will persist. And one is left wondering, after reading [*1029] Moran’s work, if “separate but [truly] equal” is not a bad thing after all.

REFERENCES:

Bell, Derrick.  2004.  SILENT COVENANTS: BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION AND THE UNFULFILLED HOPES FOR RACIAL REFORM. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cashin, Sheryll. 2004. THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION: HOW RACE AND CLASS ARE UNDERMINING THE AMERICAN DREAM.  New York: Public Affairs.

Ogletree, Charles. 2004. ALL DELIBERATE SPEED: REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST HALF-CENTURY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION.  New York:  Norton.

Rosen, Jeffrey. 2000. “The Lost Promise of School Integration.” THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 2, 2000, A1.

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 349 U.S. 294 (1955).

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Christopher Malone.