Court-ordered desegregation halved southern school segregation while the Northeast regressed

Evidence

From 1968, when the Supreme Court forced immediate desegregation in the South and border states, until 1980 the most drastic numbers can be seen in the second table. The percentage of black students attending schools containing 90-100 percent minority students had decreased in the South by 54.8 percentage points. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the programs at reducing the amount of schools which would be labeled segregated, exceeding the cut off line of 90 percent minority. The 54.8 decrease is even more impacting when compared to the U.S. total of 31.1 percent decrease. However, the Northeast did not show any signs of desegregation and, like mentioned above, they actually regressed with an increase of 6 percent of black students in segregated schools. — Marcy Crouch, Magnet Schools and Other Means of…, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the Lex Oppia / Seneca material on how law and moral signaling shape social arrangements — here law is the mechanism that actually worked. — connects to: School desegregation, not deindustrialization, drove urban reshaping in the Sunbelt South — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 39
• SEED: An essay on why coerced federal enforcement outperformed voluntary ‘choice’ models in the Northeast could be a sharp historical counterpoint to modern voluntarist policy arguments.