Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-xtvcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-16T17:00:49.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Race was a motivating factor’: re-segregated schools in the American states

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2020

Richard Johnson Open the ORCID record for Richard Johnson [Opens in a new window]  and
Desmond King
Richard Johnson*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Philosophy, & Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Desmond King
Affiliation:
Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
CONTACT Richard Johnson [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During the Obama presidency, Republicans made major gains in state legislative elections, especially in the South and the Midwest. Republicans’ control grew from 13 legislatures in 2009 to 32 in 2017. A major but largely unexamined consequence of this profound shift in state-level partisan control was the resurgence of efforts to re-segregate public education. We examine new re-segregation policies, especially school district secession and anti-busing laws, which have passed in these states. We argue that the marked reversal in desegregation patterns and upturn in re-segregated school education is part of the Republican Party's anti-civil rights and anti-federal strategies, dressed up in the ideological language of colour-blindness.

Keywords

Segregationschool integrationpublic educationracial policypartisanshiplocal governance
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 1: SI: Recent Social Policy in Canada and the United States , February 2019 , pp. 75 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

References

Bauman, C. (2017, June 28). Signal mountain leaders just visited Shelby County to learn about school secession. Chalkbeat.Google Scholar
Boser, U. (2013). Size matters: A look at school-district consolidation. Washington DC: Center for American Progress.Google Scholar
Botkins, S. (2001). Public schools. In Kleber, J. (Ed.), The encyclopedia of Louisville (pp. 735–737). Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Branston, J. (2011, March). Battering ram: The tragedy of busing revisited. Memphis: The City Magazine.Google Scholar
Brown, E. (2016, August 26). A Southern city wants to secede from its school district, raising concerns about segregation. Washington Post.Google Scholar
Buendía, E., & Humbert-Fisk, P. (2015). Building Suburban dreams: School district secession and mayoral control in Suburban Utah. Teachers College Record, 117(9), 1–52.Google Scholar
Carolina school system split goes to US supreme court. (1971, October 12). The Evening Independent.Google Scholar
Charles, C. Z. (2003). The dynamics of racial residential segregation. Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 167–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charles, C. Z. (2006). Won't you be my neighbor? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Clotfelter, C. (2004). After brown. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, J. (1975, July–August). Recent trends in school integration. Educational Researcher, 4(7), 3–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, M., & Francis, M. M. (2016). Black politics and the neoliberal racial order. Public Culture, 28(1), 23–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delmont, M. (2016). Why busing failed: Race, media, and the national resistance to school desegregation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Dorosin, M., Haddix, E., Jones, B., & Trice, C. (2011). Unless out children begin to learn together: The state of education in Halifax County, NC. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights.Google Scholar
Duncombe, W., Yinger, J., & Zhang, P. (2016). How does school district consolidation affect property values? A case study of New York. Public Finance Review, 44(1), 52–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frymer, P. (2012). Review symposium: Teachers unions and public education. Perspectives on Politics, 10(1), 124–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillespie, A. (2012). The new black politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and post-racial America. New York: NYU Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillion, D. (2017). Obama's discussion of racial policies and citizens’ racial resentment in the experimental setting. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 47(3), 517–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hackett, U., & King, D. (2017). The reinvention of education vouchers as color-blind: a racial orders account. Working paper, Oxford.Google Scholar
Hui, T. (2017, June 28). School districts too big or too small? Raleigh News & Observe.Google Scholar
Jackson, K. (2009). Student demographics, teacher sorting, and teacher quality: Evidence from the end of school desegregation. Journal of Labor Economics, 27(2), 213–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, K. (2016). The color line and the state. In Vallely, R., Mettler, S., & Lieberman, R. (Eds.), Oxford handbook of American political development (pp. 593–624). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, R. (2015). Opposition to school vouchers as a cue to black racial solidarity: Cory Booker and racial authenticity in the 2002 Newark mayoral election. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.Google Scholar
Johnson, R. (2015 [2011]). Long-run impacts of school desegregation & school quality on adult attainments (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No 16664). Revised edition.Google Scholar
Kane, T., Riegg, S., & Staiger, D. (2006). School quality, neighborhoods, and housing prices. American Law and Economics Review, 8(2), 183–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kebede, L. (2017, December 7). Here's what school leaders in Memphis suburbs aren't saying about the cost of secession. Chalkbeat.Google Scholar
King, D. (2017). Forceful federalism against American racial inequality. Government and Opposition, 52(2), 356–382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, D., & Smith, R. (2011). Still a house divided. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
King, D., & Smith, R. (2016). The last stand? Shelby County v. Holder, white political power, and America's racial policy alliances. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 13(1), 25–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
K'Meyer, T. (2013). From brown to meredith: The long struggle for school desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, R. (2002, December). Ideas, institutions, and political order: Explaining political change. American Political Science Review, 96(4), 697–712.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michener, J. (2018). Fragmented democracy: Medicaid, federalism, and unequal politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, L. (2010). The invisible black victim: How American federalism perpetuates racial inequality and criminal justice. Law & Society Review, 44(3), 805–842.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morantz, Alison. (1996). Desegregation at Risk: Threat and Reaffirmation in Charlotte. In Orfield, G (Ed.), Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown V. Board of Education. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Murakawa, N. (2006). The racial antecedents to federal sentencing guidelines: How congress judged the judges form Brown to Booker. Roger Williams University Law Review, 11(2), 473–494.Google Scholar
Navarez, A. (1990, February 13). Judge James gordon dies at 71. New York Times.Google Scholar
Ogorzalek, T. (2018). The cities on the hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Orfield, G., & Frankenberg, E. (2011). Experiencing integration in Louisville. Report to the Jefferson County Schools, University of California Civil Rights Project.Google Scholar
Orfield, G., & Frankenberg, E. (2014a). Brown at 60: Great progress, a long retreat, and an uncertain future. University of California Civil Rights Project.Google Scholar
Orfield, G., & Frankenberg, E. (2014b). Increasingly segregated and unequal schools as courts reverse policy. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(5), 718–734.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orfield, G., & Lee, C. (2007). Historic reversals, accelerating resegregation, and the need for new integration strategies. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA: Civil Rights Project.Google Scholar
Price, M. (2014). Barack Obama and the third wave: The syntaxes of whiteness and articulating difference in the post-identity era. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2(4), 573–588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rado, D., & Malone, T. (2011, February 17). Forced school district consolidations possible under quinn plan. Chicago Tribune.Google Scholar
Ray, T. (2009, November 29). More Alabama pupils eat free lunches in sour economy. AL.com.Google Scholar
Reardon, S., Grewal, E., Kalogrides, D., & Greenberg, E. (2012). Brown fades: The end of court-ordered school desegregation and the resegregation of American public schools. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 31(4), Fall, 876–904.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reardon, S., & Owens, A. (2014). 60 years after Brown: Trends and consequences of school segregation. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 199–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reardon, S., & Yun, J. (2012). Private school racial enrollments and segregation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project.Google Scholar
Reber, S. (2011). From separate and unequal to integrated and equal? School desegregation and school finance in Louisiana. Review of Economics and Statistics, 93(2), 404–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, M. (2014). The gerrymandering of school attendance zones and the segregation of public schools. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1119–1157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, D. (2018). Citizenship by degree: US higher education policy and the changing gender dynamics of American citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rushing, W. (2017). School segregation and its discontents: Chaos and community in post-civil rights memphis. Urban Education, 52(1), 3–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheingate, A. (2009). Why can't Americans see the state? The Forum, 7(4), 1–14.Google Scholar
Siegel-Hawley, G. (2016). When the fences come down: Twenty-First century lessons from metropolitan school desegregation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel-Hawley, S. D., & Frankenberg, E. (2018). The disintegration of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee: School district secession and local control in the 21st century. American Education Research Journal, 651–692.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spence, L. (2015). Knocking the hustle: Against the neoliberal turn in black politics. New York: Punctum Books.Google Scholar
Stevens, W. (1973, May 22). 5 Ex-klansmen convicted in school bus bomb plot. New York Times.Google Scholar
Tesler, M. (2012). The spillover of racialization into health care: How President Obama polarized public opinion by racial attitudes and race. American Journal of Political Science, 56, 690–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesler, M. (2013). The return of old-fashioned racism in White Americans’ partisan preferences in the early Obama era. The Journal of Politics, 75, 110–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tesler, M. (2016). Most racial, post racial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thurston, C. (2018). At the boundaries of homeownership: Credit, discrimination, and the American state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tushnet, M. (1997). Making constitutional law: Thurgood Marshall and the supreme court, 1961–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weir, M. (2005). States, race, and the decline of new deal liberalism. Studies in American Political Development, 19, 157–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar