Brown II After
Brown vs. Board of Education ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, the implementation of desegregation was discussed in a follow-up Supreme Court case termed
Brown II. Though the NAACP lawyers argued for an immediate timetable of integration, the Supreme Court issued an ambiguous order that school districts should integrate with "all deliberate speed."
Integration in response to Brown On August 23, 1954, 11 black children attended school with approximately 480 white students in
Charleston, Arkansas. The school superintendent made an agreement with local media not to discuss the event, and attempts to gain information by other sources were deliberately ignored. The process went very smoothly, followed by a similar action in
Fayetteville, Arkansas, the same fall. The following year, the integration of schools in
Hoxie, Arkansas, drew national coverage from
Life Magazine, and bitter opposition from
White Citizen's Councils and segregationist politicians ensued. Although integration allowed more Black youth access to better-funded schools, in many areas the process also resulted in the layoffs of Black teachers and administrators who had worked in all-Black schools. Opposition to integration efforts occurred in northern cities as well. For instance, in Massachusetts in 1963 and 1964, education activists staged boycotts to highlight the Boston School Committee's failure to address the de facto racial segregation of the city's public schools. In 1965, the first voluntary desegregation program—the Urban-Suburban Interdistrict Transfer Program—was implemented in
Rochester, New York by
Alice Holloway Young.
Opposition to integration Various options arose that allowed white populations to avoid the forced integration of public schools. After the Brown decision, many white families living in urban areas moved to predominantly suburban areas in order to take advantage of the wealthier and whiter schools there. William Henry Kellar, in his study of school desegregation in Houston, Texas, described the process of
white flight in Houston's Independent School District. He noted that white students made up 49.9 percent of HISD's enrollment in 1970, but that number steadily dropped over the decade. White enrollment comprised only 25.1 percent of HISD's student population by 1980. After the 1968 Supreme Court case
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County hastened the desegregation of public schools, private school attendance in the state of Mississippi soared from 23,181 students attending private school in 1968 to 63,242 students in 1970. The subject of desegregation was becoming more inflamed. In March 1970, President
Richard Nixon decided to take action. He declared Brown to be
right in both constitutional and human terms and expressed his intention to enforce the law. He also put in place a process to carry out the court's mandate. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and
George Shultz, then secretary of labor, were asked to lead a cabinet committee to manage the transition to desegregated schools. One overlooked aspect of school desegregation efforts is the persistence of
structural racism as reflected in the composition of elected school boards. Long after their schools had desegregated, many continued to operate with predominantly white trustees.
Integration of Southern universities Virginia Tech 1953 In 1953,
Virginia Tech, then known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute or VPI, became the first historically white, four-year public institution among the 11 states in the former
Confederacy to admit a black undergraduate, Irving L Peddrew of
Hampton. Three more black students were admitted in 1954. All were enrolled in the College of Engineering, as were several other black students admitted to VPI during the 1950s on the legal basis that no black college in Virginia offered an engineering program. At the time Virginia still enforced
Jim Crow laws and largely practiced
racial segregation in public and private education, churches, neighborhoods, restaurants, and movie theaters and these first black students at VPI were not allowed to live in residence halls or eat in the dining halls on campus. Instead, they boarded with African American families in Blacksburg. In 1958, Charlie L. Yates made history as the first African American to graduate from VPI. Yates earned a bachelor's degree in
mechanical engineering, with honors, and was hailed as the first African American "to be graduated from any major Southern engineering institute," according to news reports at the time.
University of Louisiana at Lafayette 1954 The
University of Louisiana at Lafayette was the first public college in the former Confederacy to integrate its student body. Southwest Louisiana Institute, as it was then known, admitted John Harold Taylor of
Arnaudville in July 1954 without incident. By September of that year when the fall semester began, 80 Black students were in attendance and no disturbances were recorded. SLI became the University of Southwestern Louisiana four years later and today is known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
University of Texas System 1950-1956 The University of Texas was the subject of the seminal Supreme Court desegregation case of
Sweatt v. Painter which resulted in the UT School of Law enrolling its first two Black students and the school of architecture enrolling its first Black student, both in August 1950. The University of Texas enrolled the first Black student at the undergraduate level in August 1956. In Spring 1955, Thelma Joyce White, the valedictorian of the segregated Douglass High School in El Paso, Texas, filed suit against the University of Texas system after her application to
Texas Western College was rejected for the 1954–1955 school year. During the pendency of her case, the United States Supreme Court issued further guidance on the
Brown v. Board of Education decision. In response to the lawsuit and further guidance, the regents of the University of Texas voted to allow Black students to enroll in Texas Western College on July 8, 1955.
Impact on Hispanic populations The implementation of school integration policies did not just affect black and white students; in recent years, scholars have noted how the integration of public schools significantly affected Hispanic populations in the south and southwest. Historically, Hispanic-Americans were legally considered white. A group of
Mexican-Americans in
Corpus Christi, Texas, challenged this classification, as it resulted in discrimination and ineffective school integration policies. In
Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970), the Federal District Court decreed that Hispanic-Americans should be classified as an ethnic minority group, and that the integration of Corpus Christi schools should reflect that. In 2005, historian Guadalupe San Miguel authored
Brown Not White, an in-depth study of how Hispanic populations were used by school districts to circumvent truly integrating their schools. It detailed that when school districts officially categorized Hispanic students as ethnically white, a predominantly African-American school and a predominantly Hispanic school could be combined and successfully pass the integration standards laid out by the U.S. government, leaving white schools unaffected. San Miguel describes how the Houston Independent School District used this loophole to keep predominantly white schools unchanged, at the disadvantage of Hispanic students. In the early 1970s, Houstonians boycotted this practice: for three weeks, thousands of Hispanic students stopped attending their local public schools in protest of the racist integration laws. In response to this boycott, in September 1972 the
Houston Independent School District (HISD) school board - following the precedent in
Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District - ruled that Hispanic students should be an official ethnic minority, effectively ending the loophole that prevented the integration of white schools. ==Impact on modern schools==