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After two decades of progress toward integration, the separation of black children in America's schools is on the rise and is in fact approaching the levels of 1970, before the first school bus rolled at the order of a court. Nationally, fully a third of black public school students attend schools where the enrollment is 90% to 100% minority--that is, black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. In the Northeast, the country's most segregated region, half of all black students attend such schools. "We have already seen the maximum amount of racial mixing in public schools that will exist in our lifetime," says University of Indiana law professor Kevin Brown, an expert on race and education. The combination of legal revisionism and residential segregation is effectively ending America's bold attempt to integrate the public schools.
This historic reversal has been welcomed by many in the African-American community. In some cities--Denver, for example--the dismantling of mandatory desegregation has been initiated by black leaders, since it is often black children who bear the brunt of such plans--forced to travel long distances to schools where they may not be welcome. In Yonkers, New York, late last year the local leader of the N.A.A.C.P. was suspended by the national organization for declaring that busing had outlived its usefulness. Clinton Adams Jr., a black attorney who is sufficiently abrasive to qualify as a militant in Kansas City--a town so even-tempered that car horns are blown only to warn of impending collisions--takes an even harder line. "The most egregious injustice is the situation where suburban white kids get priority over resident African-American kids, who are the adjudicated victims of segregation," he says. "That's atrocious. Just to try to achieve some kind of mythical benefit that black kids will receive by sitting next to a white kid?"
Homer A. Plessy, described in court papers as "of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood," bought himself a first-class ticket from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, and took a seat reserved for whites on the East Louisiana Railway. He was jailed for violating an exquisitely even-handed, race-neutral statute that forbade members of either race to occupy accommodations set aside for the other--with the exception of "nurses attending the children of the other race." Plessy insisted he was white, and when that failed, argued that criminal-court judge John H. Ferguson had violated his constitutional right to the equal protection of the laws.
In its ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson, announced May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared laws mandating that "equal but separate" treatment of the races "do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race," and cited the widely accepted propriety of separate schools for white and colored children. In dissent, Justice John Harlan remarked, "The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations...will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done."