The myth of de facto segregation was later rejected by federal courts in the 1970s, as numerous school desegregation cases revealed the broad web of discriminatory practices on the part of white school boards, politicians, realtors, and mortgage lenders that produced racial apartheid in schools outside the South. However, in the immediate wake of Brown, African Americans in the North had to constantly battle to prove that segregation of their schools had been deliberately created by local white authorities.10
