1 “Race Was a Motivating Factor”: the Rise of Re
1 “Race was a motivating factor”: The Rise of Re-Segregated Schools in the American States Richard Johnson (Lancaster) & Desmond King (Oxford) . 2 Introduction. In the two decades after the Brown v Board of Education (1954) decision, analysis of school desegregation focused on federal, judicial mechanisms. However, as the federal courts withdrew from school integration efforts, state-level mechanisms to advance school desegregation gained greater relevance. The salience of state actions grew during the eight years of the Obama presidency when Republicans gained over 1,000 state legislative seats from the Democrats. As Obama left office, Republicans dominated thirty-two state legislatures and thirty-three governorships, a record high since the New Deal. A major but largely unexamined consequence of this profound shift in state-level partisan control is the resurgence of efforts to re-segregate public education. School integration across the United States has been uneven, but many states responded to the departure of the federal courts from school integration by maintaining integrationist mechanisms. As Republicans gained partisan control during the Obama presidency, state legislatures reversed their earlier initiatives and proposed measures to erect new barriers to integration. One strategy is reviving ‘neighbourhood schools’, a code phrase for schools which reflect narrow, racially homogenous communities rather than more racially heterogeneous school districts (Delmont 2016); the term unabashedly resurrects language from the 1960s when it was used to fight the Brown directive to desegregate (Hackett and King 2017). We examine new re-segregation policies, especially school district secession and anti-busing laws, which have passed in states where Republicans assumed control during the Obama presidency.
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