Linda Brown was a third grader living in Topeka, Kansas. Her father at the time, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in a white public school four blocks from her home. Otherwise she would have had to walk across the tracks to catch a bus to the nearest All Black event.
When she was denied entry, Oliver Brown filed a lawsuit.
This case and four others from Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Virginia were combined and headed to the Supreme Court. They all involved school children being required to attend black schools of lower quality than schools for white children.
Although the Supreme Court ruled in Oliver Brown's favor in 1954, several years passed before desegregation of America's schools began in earnest. And 70 years after the nation's highest court unanimously ruled that segregation was inherently unequal, educational resources and access remain woefully unequal for many black students.
Here are the racial realities of American public education today:
25: This is the percentage increase in black-white school segregation between 1991 and 2019. This is the result of an analysis of 533 districts by sociologists Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California. School segregation declined sharply beginning with a series of court orders in 1968, but began to increase in the early 1990s due to the expiration of court orders mandating integration, school choice policies, and other factors. Nonetheless, schools are much less segregated than they were before and immediately after the Brown decision.
10: This is the percentage of black students learning in schools where more than 90% of their classmates are black., according to 2022 Ministry of Education data. This figure is down from 23% in 2000. Although segregation of black and white schools has increased slightly since the early 1990s, the number of highly segregated schools has declined, in part due to the growth of the Hispanic student population. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2022, the percentage of white students attending schools that were 90% or more white decreased from 44% to 14%.
6: This is the percentage of U.S. public school teachers who are black. By comparison, black students make up about 15% of public school enrollment. One of the legacies of Brown v. Board is the shortage of black teachers. More than 38,000 black educators have lost their jobs since the decision was made, with white administrators in integrated schools refusing to hire black professionals for teaching roles or kicking them out. However, research shows that having more Black teachers in classrooms can help improve Black student outcomes, such as college enrollment.
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2014: Wilcox County High School in rural Georgia holds its first school-sponsored, racially integrated prom. After desegregation, parents in the community, like many across the South, began organizing private, off-site prom parties to ensure that only white people could enjoy the event. This practice continued in Wilcox County until 2013, when high school students organized a prom for white and black students. The following year, the school made it official and finally held an integration event.
$14,385: This is the average amount spent per black student in public schools, compared to $14,263 per white student. According to a 2022 analysis of 2017-2018 data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Researchers found that district spending for black and white students was very similar, but funding sources were somewhat different, with black students receiving more federal funding and white students receiving more local funding. Meanwhile, the amount spent per student on instruction was slightly lower for black students ($7,169) than for white students ($7,329). Researchers attributed this to a large number of small, predominantly white school districts that spend much higher than average on their students.
7: This is the percentage of Black students admitted to the University of Mississippi in 2022. Even though nearly half of the state's public high school graduates that year, 48 percent, were black. The gap between black students graduating from Mississippi high schools and those enrolled in state universities has grown over the past decade, according to Hechinger's analysis. Similar trends are occurring elsewhere in the country. In 2022, there was a gap of more than 10 percentage points between black high school graduates and freshmen at 16 of the state's major universities. And at 24 flagships, the gap for Black students stayed the same or increased between 2019 and 2022. However, public flagships are created to educate the residents of their state, and most make this explicit.
Meeting Brown again 70 years later
The Hechinger Report examines the decision to end racial segregation in public schools, examining what has and hasn't changed since school segregation was declared illegal.
700: That's roughly how many high schools are offering the College Board's AP African American Studies course this school year. This is more than 10 times more than when it first opened a year ago. The course was created in part in response to long-standing concerns that African American history was downplayed or excluded from K-12 curricula. However, the elective AP course fell into the trap of politics. The content developed following criticism that it introduced, among other things, “divisive concepts” to students. It has been banned or restricted in some states. Nevertheless, about 13,000 students are enrolled in the second year of this pilot course, which took more than 10 years to develop. 45% of students taking the class have never previously taken another AP course for college credit.
This story about Brown v. Board of Education was produced by: Hechinger Reportis a nonprofit, independent media outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education.