Legal segregation governed schools for the large majority of Black children in 1954.

Evidence

17 Southern and border states, plus the District of Columbia, mandated racial segregation in their elementary and secondary schools. Four other states—Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming—permitted segregation by local option. So more than 70 percent of African American children in the United States attended schools in these 21 states and the District of Columbia. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2972

Categorization

• CANDY: A crisp, quotable statistic: three-quarters of Black schoolchildren lived under legally segregated schooling.