Brown@65 | More causality, less anti-blackness: historical lessons for desegregation’s future by Ansley T. Erickson

This is a lightly edited version of remarks presented at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Education and Civil Rights, May 10, 2019.

To this gathering of educators and policy makers and attorneys, as a historian I bring two lessons that the last 65 years since Brown have taught us, and what they might suggest for any desegregation effort in 2019. The first is an argument to hold on to an element of the history of school desegregation since Brown. And the other is an argument to resist or fight against an element of that history. 

The first point is about causality. As we know, Brown was not self-executing. Families, children, and lawyers had to bring cases in their districts. And to do so, local attorneys had to investigate the causal origins of segregation in their schools . This attention to causality was especially important in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when segregationist statutes were no longer on the books but segregation remained strong.  Under the framework established in the Supreme Court’s Green v. New Kent (391 U.S. 430 (1968)) decision, many attorneys looked to the details of school facilities, construction, and zoning to identify the decisions that sustained segregation in each locale. Both at the district court level and the Supreme Court, opinions in Swann v. Mecklenburg – famous for approving busing as a desegregation approach –  named the multiple and interrelated origins of persistent segregation in housing and school policy. District Judge James McMillan wrote that “There is so much state action embedded in and shaping” both housing and school segregation that “the resulting segregation is not innocent or “de facto,” and the resulting schools are not “unitary” or desegregated. The Supreme Court affirmed his decision and continued this theme (306 F.Supp 1299 (1969), 402 U.S. 1 (1971)).

And yet, starting in the mid-1970s, legal efforts to limit desegregation claimed and gained strength from the idea that segregation’s causes couldn’t be know, that they couldn’t be specified. The majority opinion in Milliken v. Bradley (418 U.S. 717 (1974)), 1974) called housing segregation’s routes “unknown and unknowable.” In Justice Antonin Scalia’s words in 1992 in Freeman v. Pitts, it would be “guesswork” to identify what has caused segregation in the U.S. (403 U.S. 467 (1992)).  If those who resist desegregation oppose talk about causality, perhaps they are telling us it is an important tool for desegregation advocacy. 

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Avon Williams, a Nashville civil rights attorney, led the suit that brought court-ordered desegregation via busing there. He demonstrated a deep focus on causality. He did of course carefully document all of the school board’s actions and policies that had created segregation and preserved it. But he was also interested in the breadth of the policy landscape that made residential segregation and in connection, school segregation. Williams, for example, dug through the city’s capital budgets to notice how city planners linked federal urban renewal dollars and school planning to allow the city to subsidize segregated school construction with the construction of segregated public housing. Williams was naming and calling into public view the causes of segregation in Nashville, more than 15 years after Brown (Erickson, 2016).

In the decades since, many historians have endeavored to look at the historical record to confirm the kinds of patterns that Williams noticed. They also identified yet other policy choices at the city, state and federal levels that were part of segregation’s origins, but may not have been appreciated at the time. For example, Nashville’s city planning agency adopted a popular, nationally-influential planning concept called the neighborhood unit. The concept bound together ideas of neighborhood and school and insisted upon segregation in both. From city planning discourse, the concept made its way into school planning, and helped shape the segregated the metropolis (Highsmith and Erickson, 2015; Erickson and Highsmith, 2018).

Ironically, the judge who ordered extensive desegregation in Nashville did so without fully recognizing the causal argument Williams made. The judge instead turned to the false idea of de facto segregation as Nashville’s problem. This terminology recognized contemporary patterns of segregation but obscured their origins (Erickson, 2016).

I am not claiming that causality succeeds as a legal strategy. Rather attending to causality is a necessary strategy for defining and perceiving the problem. Following Williams’ lead to investigate segregation’s many causal roots in policy and in allied forms of private action means revealing the breadth, the variety, the capaciousness of individual and collective investment in segregation. I use investment literally, not metaphorically. Dollars went into making the segregated landscape, and those dollars grew and multiplied in the pockets of local developers, landlords, real estate and finance industry professionals, and white homeowners. 

This means that attending to causation improves our thinking about desegregation by changing the comparisons implicit in our discourse. Often our discourse compares proposals to use busing for desegregation with the immense and sometimes violent scale of white resistance. But there is another more important comparison: between proposals to bus children, which appear quite modest as policy interventions versus the full collection of ways in which government and private action segregated the American metropolis. 

For those advocating for desegregation in 2019, I suggest returning to a civil rights lawyer’s interest in causation. These attorneys insisted on speaking of desegregation not only in terms of individual and collective racism, but in terms of nameable, consequential, enduring policy choices. If we were to do so today, I believe, it would be one step toward building the foundation of a more ambitious and a more varied, possibly more creative set of approaches to desegregation today.

Talking about causality might open the door for an investment in desegregation that comes close to matching our nation’s massive historic investment in segregation.

And to the second argument, a different point. Here we should not embrace of an element of desegregation’s history since Brown, but instead reject an part of that history. I am speaking of the potent anti-blackness visible in the conceptualization and the implementation of desegregation. I use this term rather than the more generic racism, although racism is certainly a valid term in this case. I choose the term because desegregation targeted all-black institutions and communities by defining them as the problem to solve or eradicate. The process of desegregation privileged the stated interests of white students and communities and families over not only the felt interests but the civil rights of black families and their children and communities. They did so in many ways, including decisions about which community got schools and which lost them, and in the massive firings of black teachers and administrators in the wake of Brown. In my book I reprinted a photograph of two white boys striding confidently down a hallway lined with black children observing them as they pass. I have in mind one image from my research in Nashville, of a hallway in a desegregating high school in 1979. It’s a helpful visual metaphor. Two white boys stride confidently down the center of the passage, as black boys and girls line the walls. White children at the center, and black children at the edges, in what was one of the most statistically desegregated systems in the country. 

The photo conveys a story that is often missed in a historic and scholarly focus on white resistance to desegregation. Or put differently, anti-blackness is a problem in both the history of desegregation and scholarship about it as well. It has taken decades of work, sparked in large part by James Anderson and Vanessa Siddle-Walker and other young scholars working since, to perceive African American education without focusing only on desegregation (Anderson 1988, Siddle-Walker 2004). With a broader lens, scholars began to recount what black communities built in the segregated south, what black communities built in Head Start centers, and in a variety of autonomous black educational spaces (Sanders 2016, Rickford 2016). The challenge for desegregation advocates today, and especially for white advocates, is to recognize the consequences of framing black schools as the problem desegregation was to solve. Out of that framing, came a policy that, even in its most statistically successful iterations such as in Nashville, repeatedly privileged white children and communities over black children and communities. That history has to be traversed, confronted, and dealt with. It can’t be avoided in thinking about desegregation today. 

Part of what motivates me to think in these ways is the work I’m doing a few days a week at a high school. Less than a mile from Columbia’s campus, the high school is a segregated African American majority school in a local school district that is demographically and economically very diverse within the larger New York City system. In some ways this school, under-resourced and overburdened by concentrated poverty and its consequences, represents many schools and many school systems in the US. Its existence then poses the question of whether efforts at desegregation, which are underway in the district, can name causal mechanisms that have made and sustained this segregation. And it questions whether the desegregation effort can also recognize and value the black educational traditions that this school can draw on. Is there a desegregation model in 2019 that understands that African American educational history not as a problem, but a resource, a starting point, to conceptualize a more just approach to desegregation? 

As scholars in this field know, we have a robust literature in the history of desegregation. That literature has gradually worked to overcome some of its historic blind spots, although I’m sure (including in my own work) there are some that remain. 

This scholarship suggests that the next phase of desegregation advocacy should pursue a clear, causal interpretation of segregation’s origins, and must recognize the anti-blackness of desegregation’s past to seek new approaches. 

This is the second installment in our Brown@65 Series. Contributors to this series for the AJE Forum presented these pieces at the Brown@65 Conference hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights and the university’s Africana Research Center. We invite you to join our conversation by commenting below, engaging us on AJE’s social media platforms, or submitting an essay of your own.

Ansley T. Erickson is Associate Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago, 2016) and the co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Columbia, 2019).

References:

Anderson, J. (1988). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1865-1930. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 

Erickson, A. T. (2016). Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Is Limits. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Erickson, A. T., & Highsmith, A. (2018). The Neighborhood Unit: Schools, Segregation, and the Making of the Modern Metropolitan Landscape. Teachers College Record,120, 1-36.

Highsmith, A. R., & Erickson, A. T. (2015). Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining: Schools, Housing, and the Many Modes of Jim Crow. American Journal of Education,121(4), 563-595. doi:10.1086/681942

Rickford, R. (2016). We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sanders, C. (2016). A chance for change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black freedom struggle. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Walker, V. S. (1994). Their highest potential: An African American school community in the segregated South. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.