The Diffusion of the Decision to Integrate: Southern School Desegregation, 1954-1964

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
THE DIFFUSION OF THE DECISION TO INTEGRATE: SOUTHERN SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, 1954-1964 John W. Florin* In May of 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled in Broivn v. Board of Education of Topeka that ". . . in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated . . . are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment." (Z) The statement seemed clear—the existence of all formally sanctioned racial segregation in the nation's schools must be eliminated. This landmark ruling affected 17 states where segregation in public primary and secondary schools was legally permissible, and set in motion changes that are still sweeping public education in the Southeastern quadrant of the United States. This paper examines the spatial diffusion of desegregation in the ten Southern states east of Texas during the decade after the proclamation of the anti-discrimination policy. The Court gave local authorities the opportunity to offer arguments as to the mode of enforcement of the decision before handing down an implementing decision. That decision, the second Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was released a year after the initial pronouncement . The opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Warren, recognized that "full implementation of these constitutional principles may require solution of varied local school problems." (2) The local courts were given the responsibility for both hearing the initial complaints that might be brought against a school district and for determining whether or not the school authorities were acting in good faith in their efforts to desegregate their system Thus the concept of gradualism, or "all deliberate speed" to use the Court's phrase, was introduced as the basic guideline for school integration, and the power to applv and enforce the guideline was spread among a large number of local federal court judges. At the time of the first Broten decision, only two out of a total of of 2,195 school districts containing both black and white pupils were integrated in the ten states. The ruling, if successfully executed, was clearly going to force a massive physical and philosophical reorganization of the Southern educational system. Data concerning the progress of school integration in this region after 1954 are difficult to obtain. Easily the best source is the series of annual statistical summaries published by the Southern Education Reporting Service. Indeed, the Service prided itself on being the only source for the region's statistics on school deseg- *Dr. Florin is assistant professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This paper was accepted for publication in July 1971. 140Southeastern Geographer regation. (3) The quality of the statistical material in the summaries varies widely. Many of the data utilized in this study are from the 1965 edition, which contained consistent information that was amenable to spatial analysis. The progress of integration in the public primary and secondary schools in the region during the decade between the first Brown ruling in 1954 and the release of the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 reflected the influence of the gradualism policy (Table 1 ). The pace was measured TABLE 1 PERCENTAGE OF NEGRO PUPILS IN SCHOOLS WITH WHITES, 1954-1964 Year State1954-551957-581961-621964-65 AlabamaOMOOÖOfX)Ö03~~ Arkansas0.020.090.140.81 Florida0.000.000.272.67 Georgia0.000.000.000.40 Louisiana0.000.000.001.14 Mississippi0.000.000.000.02 N. Carolina0.000.000.061.42 S. Carolina0.000.000.000.10 Tennessee0.000.090.755.35 Virginia0.000.000.245.15 TOTALOlJÖO03ÔIÏ1.32 Source: Southern Education Reporting Service, op. cit. and slow. By the 1964-65 academic year only 324 out of a possible 1,348 districts were certified as desegregated. Furthermore, fewer than 40,000 of the 1,280,000 Negro students in the desegregated districts were actually attending integrated schools. The decade was marked by a continuing series of court rulings that attempted to clarify the concept of "all deliberate speed" and to identify what constituted an integrated school district. (4) Still, many of the...

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: