In this light, we are now able to see why the Supreme Court decisions, on school desegregation, which we described at the time as historic, have not made history. After twelve years, barely 12 percent school integration existed in the whole South, and in the Deep South the figure hardly reached 2 percent.7 And even these few schools were in many cases integrated only with a handful of Negroes. The decisions indeed mandated a profound degree of genuine equality; for that very reason, they failed of implementation. They were, in a sense, historical errors from the point of view of white America.
