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‘Resegregation Has Happened Because of Intentional Decision-Making’ - CounterSpin interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones on school resegregation
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The May 10, 2019, episode of CounterSpin reaired an interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones—originally broadcast August 29, 2014—about the resegregation of schools in the decades following Brown v. Board of Education. This is a lightly edited transcript.
MP3 Link
Janine Jackson: Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling demanding the racial desegregation of the country’s public schools, will turn 65 this month. The ruling spotlighted racial inequities in education, and spurred civil rights activism and legislation. It did not, however, lead to desegregation, such that Congressmember Bobby Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, recently held a hearing titled “Brown v. Board of Education at 65: A Promise Unfulfilled.”
We talked about resegregation on Brown’s 2014 anniversary with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Now at the New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones was then a reporter at ProPublica, where her series“Segregation Now” appeared. Here’s CounterSpin‘s Peter Hart speaking with Nikole Hannah-Jones in May of 2014.
Peter Hart: You chose to tell this story through the experience of one town, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Why did you think Tuscaloosa’s story was so instructive?
Nikole Hannah-Jones: Well, there were a few reasons. I really felt that I didn’t want to just cover that resegregation was happening, that there are lots of reports to show it’s happening and say it’s happening, but kind of leave it up in the air as to how it happens. And I think when you do that, then you give people the opportunity to fill in the blanks, that it’s kind of “natural,” or it’s just “the way things have to be,” and it’s no one’s fault. I really wanted to show that the resegregation has happened largely because of intentional decision-making, and that there actually are people who are at fault. So that was one of the reasons I chose Tuscaloosa.
Nikole Hannah-Jones: “Within three months of being released from the court order, Tuscaloosa decided to break apart those integrated schools and create an entirely all-black feeder system.” (cc photo: Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo)
Tuscaloosa had managed to create a numerically perfect integration when a court ordered to merge its middle and high schools into single citywide schools. And in 2000, it was released from its court order. And within three months of being released from the court order, Tuscaloosa decided to break apart those integrated schools and create an entirely all-black feeder system, where a third of black students in city schools would go from kindergarten to graduation in all-black schools. So that’s why I chose Tuscaloosa, because I was really wanting to dig around into the intentional decisions that led to that resegregation.
PH: You mentioned the court order and, reading your piece, you see a lot of policy choices and a lot of subsequent court decisions, that almost seemed to be delivering the verdict that, “Desegregation efforts look like they’re working, so we should stop doing them.”
One of your follow-up pieces takes a look at these desegregation orders. There are hundreds of them around the country, many fewer than there used to be. It’s amazing to see—and your reporting fleshes this out—how little oversight, or even tracking, is happening on this very important issue of how schools are supposed to desegregate.
NHJ: Absolutely. So the South went from the most segregated, absolute apartheid region of the country, to the most integrated region of the country, because of federal court orders. And really, from the span of 1964 to the early ’70s, you saw a complete transformation of the South, where 90 percent of black students were attending schools with white children, and it was because of those court orders.
But what we found is that there was a heavy enforcement of those court orders for a couple of decades. And then what has resulted has been really non-enforcement of most of these court orders for recent decades.
And that’s for a couple of reasons. The Supreme Court has really backed away from desegregation, it hasn’t ruled in favor of desegregation for decades, and it made it clear that these desegregation orders were not to be permanent, and that they should end as quickly as possible. But also just a real lack of oversight and, I think, political will to enforce the orders.
So I found dozens of districts where they remained under federal desegregation order, but district leadership didn’t know the orders were open, they didn’t know what the order said. The DoJ wasn’t enforcing. The Department of Ed wasn’t enforcing. And they just were sitting dormant, even though students have rights under these orders.
PH: Yeah, reading that the Justice Department isn’t even sure what the number of orders is, and their list looks like it might be incomplete, it’s really troubling.
It’s hard to understand schools and school segregation without understanding housing policy and housing discrimination. I was struck by a line in your piece about school district officials saying there was really not much they could do about the transformation in Tuscaloosa creating an all-black high school, because “you can’t help where people live.” How does housing discrimination—this is something you’ve written about extensively, prior to this series—how does that factor into the story of school segregation?
NHJ: First let me say that in Tuscaloosa, and actually in many districts, that argument that schools are segregated because neighborhoods are segregated wasn’t necessarily true for all schools, particularly the high school. There was a great deal of gerrymandering of attendance zones in Tuscaloosa, which we show through mapping.
And, actually, the neighborhood that the all-black high school is located in was a majority white neighborhood, but those kids were bussed to a more integrated school.
Black-white segregation in US metro areas (Brookings, 12/17/18).
But more generally, housing of course drives segregated schools. If you place schools in neighborhoods that are heavily one race or another, you’re going to have segregated schools. And in cities like Detroit, and cities like Chicago, New York, of course these are some of the most segregated cities residentially, and so they are also some of the most segregated cities in terms of schools.
And that’s part of what the Supreme Court in the early ’70s, when it authorized bussing as a form of desegregation in the Charlotte schools, was trying to break that link between housing and schools, understanding that they actually drive each other. If a neighborhood has a segregated school, people who have choices won’t move into that neighborhood. And vice versa, if a neighborhood has a stably integrated school, people will tend to move into a neighborhood like that.
So we often blame residential segregation on school segregation, but the inverse is also true. And that’s what subsequent rulings on bussing were trying to break up: that you couldn’t buy into an integrated neighborhood, because you may not be going to the school in your neighborhood.
PH: Now, finally, reporters want their work to have some impact in the world. This is a very ambitious project. What do you think can come of a reporting project like this? What kind of impact can it have?
NHJ: I tend to pick these really intractable issues to write about—housing segregation and school segregation. But I think part of it to me was, I don’t feel many Americans know this history. I think we have a very truncated, and a rosy, view of what happened after Brown. We don’t understand the levels of resistance, and how long it took for integration to happen.
I tell the story through three generations of one family in Tuscaloosa, and the grandfather, even though he started school the year that Brown was decided, he never attended a integrated school. And the only one in the three generations who did attend an integrated school was the mother, who was that kind of in-between generation, when there was real integration. And now her own child is back in segregated schools. So I thought that was important, just to lay that history out for Americans, so that we can understand why we are as we are.
But also, of course, hoping that if people are knowledgeable that this is intentional in many ways, that the segregation is not accidental—because I think we’ve also let ourselves off the hook as a society, because we believe in the inevitability of all of this, or that it’s somehow a benign process that leads to schools being 99 percent black and Latino—I wanted to show very clearly that [it’s] not, and that reporters can dig in their own communities, and look at the policy decisions that have led to the resegregation.
And thirdly, on a very small scale, in Tuscaloosa, I knew there had long been people who believed that deals had been made, but could never prove it. And in Tuscaloosa, there are conversations that have not happened before, there’s proof that the community didn’t have before. And as that community is getting ready to redistrict its schools yet again, the conversation there is very different. They know that someone’s watching, and the people who want more equity now feel like they have the power to push for it.
Janine Jackson: That was reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, speaking with CounterSpin‘s Peter Hart, five years ago this month. The series, “Segregation Now,” can still be found at ProPublica.org.
Featured Image: Nikole Hannah-Jones participating in a 2016 New America conference (photo: New America).
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