Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits

• In Event: 14.033 - School Desegregation and Educational Equality in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

Amid growing scholarly and public engagement with the problem of school segregation and the possibility of desegregation, historical perspective is needed now more than ever. Most American school districts did not achieve significant desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education, but a few did. Nashville, Tennessee is one of these. There, a consolidated city-county school system and court-ordered busing together made Nashville one of the most statistically desegregated school systems in the country from 1971 through 1998.
Despite this statistical success, Nashville schools never achieved full equality of educational opportunity. Drawing on my new book on the topic, my remarks will focus on how desegregation in Nashville worked to remake educational inequality in the process of statistical desegregation. Local officials and federal courts shaped desegregation to respect majority-white suburban privilege and to foster economic growth, continuing old inequalities in new forms. After a decade of busing, long-standing advocates for desegregation worked to adjust their approaches, hoping to pair statistical desegregation with substantive equity. Yet they found the era’s legal frameworks for measuring desegregation unresponsive. Like many school systems, Nashville exited court supervised desegregation in the 1990s and soon returned to significant school segregation, especially at the elementary school level.
I document Nashville’s case through extensive research in legal records, municipal archival collections, individual papers, and oral histories conducted with former students, teachers, desegregation advocates and school officials.
The accomplishments, as well as the limitations, of Nashville’s story offer helpful lessons for policymakers exploring desegregation today. Today’s advocates need to consider the many forces, structural and systemic as much as individual, that can stymie efforts for desegregation and educational equality.

Author

• Ansley T. Erickson, Teachers College, Columbia University