Race, Schooling, and the Myth of Linear Progress
A beginner's guide to how desegregation, resistance, and institutions shaped American education
One of the most persistent myths in history is the story of steady progress. It’s not that there hasn’t been progress. There has. It’s just that progress doesn’t follow a clean, linear, always-moving-forward path.
The same is true for the history of American education.
The common narrative is that schools moved from legally enforced, state-mandated segregation to desegregation and toward integration. The outlawing of racial segregation in schools with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 seemed to put the segregation issue to rest. In this version of the story, modern day racial segregation in schools is viewed as the result of natural events—of things outside the government’s control.
This story is misleading.
The history of race and schooling in the United States does not (and has not) moved in a straight line. Progress isn’t inevitable: it often feels like one step forward, two steps back. Advances in racial equality have consistently produced counter-backlash movements—often disguised, performed through institutions, and constructed in ways that make them legal. The push and pull between racial progress and backlash illiberalism have shaped and reshaped the school landscape in ways that make schools a central location in fights over American democracy.
Why schools matter so much
Schools are contested places. They have always carried meaning beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Schools have a civic mission. They are sites of citizenship, political control, local community identity, and public investment. Decisions about who attends which schools, who governs them, how they are financed, and how they are resourced have always been entangled with questions about race, democracy, and fairness.
Brown v. Board of Education took up questions about the foundational identity of American public schools. Writing in Supreme Court’s ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren pointed out that:
schools are the very foundation of good citizenship. [They are] a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him adjust normally to his environment.
Ending legally mandated, state-sponsored school segregation challenged many white southerners’ views about how schools cultivated citizenship. Brown wasn’t just about challenging racial hierarchy; it was about confronting deeply held assumptions about the make up of communities and the political control embedded within them.
Understanding the desegregation and resegregation that followed Brown requires paying attention to court rulings, institutions, and the politics of educational authority.
What Brown did—and did not—do
Brown v. Board of Education declared legally enforceable, state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It nullified the laws the mandated segregated schooling. Brown did not, however, specify how, when, or under what conditions desegregation or integration should occur.
That gap mattered.
Almost immediately after the Court handed down its decision on May 17, 1954, many white southerners vowed resistance. Governor-elect Marvin Griffin of Georgia, for example, warned that his incoming administration would take no action to comply. “If the United States Supreme Court is so unrealistic as to attempt to enforce this unthinkable evil upon us [the evil of integrated schools],” he railed, “I serve notice now that we shall resist it with all the resources at our disposal.”
In the years that followed, federal courts issued orders, states passed noncompliance laws, and school districts devised plans in an attempt to mediate this tug-of-war. Some willingly moved toward desegregation, but many did not. Southern and border state segregationists—and white political elites across the country—found ways to technically satisfy the Court’s legal mandates while minimizing actual integration.
Brown did not result in a clean transition from segregation to equality. Instead, it kicked off a prolonged struggle over implementation and a back-and-forth policy battle over the future of American schooling.
To understand this struggle, it helps to abandon the idea that desegregation was a single event or a brief fifteen year moment in time. School integration has been a long, protracted social conversation that’s been playing out in real time for over fifty years—one that’s been uneven, constantly contested, and shaped by federal, state, and local political decisions.
Progress and harm at the same time
One of the hardest things to wrap your head around is that desegregation could produce both gains and losses simultaneously.
In many communities, integration expanded access to resources and provided new educational opportunities for Black students. But, in other communities, integration came at the cost of Black educational institutions as white school leaders closed Black schools, demoted Black principals, and dismissed Black teachers.
These outcomes were not inevitable nor were they accidental. They were the result of specific choices—choices made by courts, white political elites, white school board members, and white school administrators who treated integration as a technical problem rather than a social one.
Recognizing this complexity does not diminish the moral force of desegregation. It clarifies the struggle over its implementation. It highlights why true integration has been so hard to achieve.
How white resistance to integration adapted
Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown, many southern states—under the control of white political elites—embarked on campaigns of legislative and regulatory massive resistance. Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, for example, all passed laws disallowing the funding of desegregated education.
When the use of state policy levers to preserve segregated public schools became untenable, white resistance began to move into private spaces. Discussing the need for white families to flee integrating public schools, Governor Hugh L. White of Mississippi said in a television and radio address that he would be working on a private school solution for white Mississippians.
White opposition to desegregation increasingly took on institutional forms:
private schooling
district boundaries and school attendance zones
administrative discretion
and appeals to neutrality, efficiency, or local control
These new institutional forms of resistance often avoided explicitly racial language. White resisters didn’t need to use the overtly racist language of their segregationist forefathers.
Racial segregation persisted in public education—and even intensified as white flight from urban city centers picked up steam in the 1970s—under the banner of choice, reform, and compliance.
This is one reason why the history of schooling post-Brown can feel paradoxical: why it often feels like one step forward, two steps back. Formal equality expanded while, at the same time, substantive equality remained (and still remains) elusive.
Why institutions matter
Institutions are an important (if not the key) part of this story.
It’s tempting to explain the history of American education after Brown as the result of individual motives and decisions—as racism, fear, or good intentions gone awry. But even though those things are part of the story, they're not the whole story.
What mattered just as much were the institutions at play in the drama. These included courts that prioritized order, districts that centralized decision-making and wrote boundary policies, political entities (e.g., politicians, legislatures, departments of education) that legitimized certain responses through speech, silence, or regulation.
Institutions shape what happens not only through what they do but also by what they allow.
Understanding the role of institutions helps explain why similar patterns appear across regions, over decades, and when actors and contexts differ.
What Yesterday’s Classrooms tries to do
The essays on Yesterday’s Classrooms take this non-linear history seriously. Rather than asking whether desegregation worked, they ask:
how it was implemented
who bore its costs
how resistance appeared and reappeared as avenues opened and closed
and why the past matters so much for making sense of today’s schools
Some posts focus on specific cases, documents, or communities. Others look into the broader political and social structures that shape schooling. The writing on Yesterday’s Classrooms attempts to make visible the history behind the school conflicts that often feel contemporary.
How to read this history
It helps to read history with nuance and care. This guide encourages us to look past historical outcomes to the processes that produced them.
Instead of asking “did schools become integrated;” ask “how did decisions about school desegregation get made.”
Instead of stopping with the question “why did segregation persist;” continue on to ask “what institutional pathways made it possible.”
These questions don’t have simple or easy answers, rather, they provide a framework for reading—one that will result in a better understanding of how we got here.
Where to go next
If you’re new to this history, you might want to begin with essays that show how desegregation unfolded in practice and how white resistance to integration reorganized itself in the late 1960s.
Two good places to start:
Closing Black Schools to Achieve Integration which shows how integration often proceeded through political decisions that harmed Black communities.
“Everybody Knows the Reason. I Don’t Have to Tell You” which examines the private, whites-only academies that emerged as many white families fled integrating public schools.
These two essays highlight what Yesterday’s Classrooms tries to do. They show how desegregation unfolded in real time and uncover how white resistance reshaped the school terrain around it.
If you’d like to read further
If you’re interested in deeper contexts and some scholarly analysis from historians working in this field, I recommend starting with the following books:
Brown’s Battleground by Jill Ogline Titus which provides a clear account of school desegregation in Virginia.
The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley which examines white resistance strategies to school integration in Alabama.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein which documents how public policy structured racial inequity.
This short list will get you going in the right direction.
More to come soon.
References:
Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s. Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
“Legislature Given Stand-By Powers to Aid Segregation.” The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), December 17, 1954.
St. John, M. L. “Legislature Fight Hinted as School Proposal Passes. The Atlanta Constitution, November 4, 1954.