Definition
School integration is the legal, political, and administrative effort to bring Black and white students into the same public schools, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and continuing through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in increasingly conflict-ridden phases as the project moved from explicit Southern dual systems to the de-facto residential segregation of Northern and Western cities.
It is the constitutional and policy response to the educational arm of Jim Crow and its Northern equivalents. Its results have been partial, geographically uneven, and contested to the present day.
Why it matters
How it works
The integration project unfolded in four major phases.
Brown v. Board, 1954 to 1964
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional in public education. The 1955 follow-up (Brown II) ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed" — a famously soft instruction that Southern districts read as a license to delay. Through 1964, fewer than 2 percent of Black children in the eleven former Confederate states attended integrated schools.
Federal enforcement, 1964 to 1971
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 conditioned federal education funding on desegregation compliance. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 created the funding for the Office for Civil Rights to actually leverage. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) replaced "deliberate speed" with the demand for a working desegregation plan. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) authorized busing as a remedy. Southern Black integration percentages climbed sharply — by 1972, roughly 90 percent of Black students in the South attended formally desegregated schools.
Northern collision, 1971 to 1980
When the Court turned to Northern districts, the geography of housing segregation made integration mathematically impossible within most existing district lines. The remedy was cross-district busing. The Boston busing crisis began in 1974 when Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the city's schools desegregated; white residents of South Boston and Charlestown responded with stonings of school buses, mass demonstrations, and protracted street violence. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that suburban districts around Detroit could not be drawn into a single integration plan with the city, effectively setting district lines as the limit of the integration remedy. This decision, more than any other, ended deep integration as a practical possibility in metro areas where housing was segregated by jurisdiction line.
Retreat, 1981 to present
Federal commitment to integration weakened sharply in the 1980s. The Supreme Court released a series of districts from their desegregation orders (Oklahoma City 1991, DeKalb County 1992). Public-school segregation by 2010 was, by some measures, back to roughly 1970 levels in the South and slightly higher in the North. Charter schools and choice systems, in many cities, have not changed this pattern.