In light of the recent Supreme Court decision that disqualified race as a major factor in student assignment, NBER just released a new quantitative study that takes a new look at school desegregation efforts in the South. The authors of the report concluded that the courts were not as important to desegregation efforts as previously thought.
Most historians believe that school desegregation after Brown vs. Board of Education (1956) would not have happed without Supreme Court decisions like Green v. New Kent County (1968) (strengthened court-ordered desegregation) and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971) (desegregation via busing). Yet, the authors of the study found that schools had already desegregated (to some extent) before Green and most desegregation was completed prior to the Swann decision. Furthermore, schools not under court supervision to desegregate had done so before 1976. According to the authors, this suggests that “the need for court involvement to achieve desegregation may have been overemphasized for the typical Southern district.”
Historians may have to rethink their assumption that only judicial activism and paternalism could have forced those racist Southerners to comply with Brown.
