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But the thin disguise endured for a half-century, until a series of school-segregation cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and violate the Constitution's equal-protection guarantee, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled on May 17, 1954. A year later, the court ruled that school districts must admit black students on a nondiscriminatory basis "with all deliberate speed" and instructed the federal district courts to retain jurisdiction "during this period of transition."
The nation is still in that period of transition, observes Kenneth Clark, 81, the black sociologist upon whose work the Brown decision in part relied. "I didn't realize how deep racism was in America, and I suppose the court didn't realize it either," he says. Ten years after Brown, when only 2% of black children in the South attended schools with whites, the court announced, "The time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." In 1968 the court declared that discrimination must be "eliminated root and branch." In 1971, noting that about 40% of American schoolchildren routinely rode buses to and from school anyway, the court held in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that the federal courts could order busing to desegregate schools.
Busing broke the back of segregation in the South, where 36.4% of black students attended majority-white schools by 1972. But Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion in Swann also opened the door for the federal courts to get out of the integration business. Once legally enforced segregation was eliminated, he wrote, single-race schools would not offend the Constitution unless some agency of the government had deliberately resegregated them.
Since the end of World War II, as blacks have streamed into the cities in search of work, whites have streamed out--in search of greener lawns and whiter neighbors. Anytime blacks were able to breach the wall of restrictive covenants, brokers' steering and mortgage redlining to begin to integrate a neighborhood, white flight and resegregation quickly followed. By 1970, with the white birthrate plunging, Northern urban school districts, which seldom extend beyond city limits, lacked enough white children to desegregate.
A dearth of whites led a federal court to order the city of Detroit to integrate its schools with those of 53 surrounding districts. In 1974 the Supreme Court struck down that order, holding in Milliken v. Bradley that suburban districts could not be ordered to help desegregate a city's schools unless those suburbs had been involved in illegally segregating them in the first place. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned in dissent that the court had set a course that would allow "our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities--one white, the other black..."
That is exactly what happened. School segregation exacerbated residential segregation, as whites chose not to live in neighborhoods served by predominantly minority schools. Detroit's public school system is now 94% minority. By 1990, in the 18 largest Northern metropolitan areas, blacks had become so isolated that 78% of them would have had to move in order to achieve an evenly distributed residential pattern. The Milliken ruling, says Indiana University's Brown, "eliminated all hope of meaningful desegregation in most of the country's major urban areas."