Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children

by Noliwe Rooks

The court took up the case in February 1974 and struck down the lawsuit 5–4, saying that since the suburbs did not cause Detroit’s problems, suburbanites did not have to be part of the solution. The Milliken case absolved white parents of any responsibility for integration and effectively halted a strategy that would have helped Detroit achieve desegregation and given Black children access to the well-resourced schools white people had established in its suburbs. Joyce Baugh, a professor who has written extensively about the case, says it intensified white people’s desire to “move away from urban schools to, in effect, outrun desegregation.”

The former dean of Howard University’s School of Education, Leslie Fenwick, estimates the total number of Black teachers and principals fired following the Brown decision to have been roughly one hundred thousand and the economic impact on Black communities due to the loss of salaries as equivalent to roughly $2.2 billion today.

And therein lies the dilemma: Do you attempt to dilute the inherent, unequal nature of segregation and eliminate the effects of the legacy of education denial by bringing a racial balance to school districts? Or do you allow people to live within the safety of their comfort zones and provide communities with the resources and stabilizing policies they have been historically denied?

Forty-five percent of Black children attend majority-Black, majority-poor schools, compared with 8 percent of white students who attend under-resourced schools.