36. The Long Road to Integration
Why declaring a right is only the beginning—and what it took to make Brown real
In 1954, the Supreme Court made history.
Brown v. Board of Education declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution. Separate was not equal. The law had changed.
But on the ground, almost nothing did.
Schools didn’t automatically open their doors to Black students. Buses didn’t change their routes. Neighborhood lines didn’t disappear. A legal declaration, no matter how powerful, doesn’t change a system overnight.
This is the story of what came next—how the promise of Brown slowly, painfully, and unevenly made its way into practice.
“All Deliberate Speed”: A Phrase That Changed Everything
The year after Brown, the Supreme Court issued a second opinion—Brown II (1955)—to answer the obvious question: What does desegregation actually look like, and how fast should it happen?
The Court told schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”
That phrase was meant to be firm but fair. In practice, it became a shield for delay. Across the South, local judges allowed school boards to move slowly (or not at all), framing inaction as pragmatism. This wasn’t accidental. Courts and school officials often acted in quiet coordination to preserve existing power structures while claiming legal compliance. What emerged was less a commitment to equality than a careful choreography of delay.
Resistance in the South: Central High School and Cooper v. Aaron
Some states didn’t even try to hide their opposition. They passed new laws, closed public schools entirely, or redirected public funds to private, whites-only academies.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, nine Black teenagers (later known as the Little Rock Nine) were chosen to integrate Central High School. But when they tried to enter, the governor called in the National Guard to block them.
Crowds gathered. Threats were made. For weeks, these students couldn’t get into their own school.
President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect them and enforce the court’s order. The image of soldiers escorting teenagers became a national symbol: the federal government was stepping in, finally, to make civil rights real.
In Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court made it official. No state, no governor, no school board could defy Brown. The Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it, was the supreme law of the land.
Money Talks: The Civil Rights Act of 1964
Even with court rulings and federal troops, many school districts dragged their feet. A full decade after Brown, most Black students in the South were still attending segregated schools.
That began to change after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The law gave the federal government a new tool: money. If schools refused to desegregate, they could lose federal funding. That threat worked. Suddenly, many districts began to comply, not out of moral awakening, but out of financial necessity.
This shift also marked an important lesson: constitutional rights need infrastructure. Courts could declare a right, but meaningful enforcement required legislative action, executive pressure, and administrative oversight.
“Freedom of Choice” Wasn’t Really Free
To resist integration without openly defying the law, many school districts adopted “freedom of choice” plans. On paper, these plans sounded fair: any student, Black or white, could choose which school to attend. There were no bans, no quotas, no explicit segregation.
But in practice, the system was rigged.
White school boards remained in control and rarely encouraged Black students to transfer. Families who tried to integrate were often met with retaliation—sometimes quiet, sometimes violent. Black parents who applied to send their children to white schools might lose jobs or housing. Children who transferred often faced harassment, isolation, and worse. And even when they made it through the schoolhouse door, they were sometimes placed in lower-level classes or given separate activities.
Meanwhile, white families rarely chose to attend Black schools. The idea of “choice” masked an unequal playing field, where one group had power, resources, and control—and the other was navigating risk, fear, and resistance.
What’s often forgotten is that some Black communities initially supported these models, hoping they would foster agency, self-determination, or local control. But in most places, “freedom of choice” operated in a system structured by white dominance, where “choice” simply reproduced inequality under a different name.
So while the courts initially tolerated these plans, they eventually saw through the façade. In Green v. County School Board (1968), the Supreme Court called it out: if nothing changed, it wasn’t compliance—it was cover. Schools, the Court said, had an affirmative duty to eliminate segregation. It wasn’t enough to stop discriminating—they had to repair what had already been done.
Busing and Redrawing the Map: Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971)
After Green, the question wasn’t whether schools had to integrate—it was how far they had to go to make it real.
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court approved bold new remedies to ensure that desegregation wasn’t just a formality. The Court said federal courts could require school districts to use powerful tools to undo the effects of past segregation. That included:
Geographic zoning: Redrawing school boundaries to promote racial balance
Busing: Transporting students to different neighborhoods to create more integrated classrooms
Restructuring school assignments: Changing feeder patterns so schools would not reflect residential segregation
Faculty integration: Ensuring teachers were not racially assigned to reinforce separation
The Court recognized that when segregation had been created by official action—laws, school board decisions, district boundaries—then equally deliberate remedies were justified. Neutrality wouldn’t fix a system built on intentional separation.
And for a time, the Swann decision worked. Courts got more aggressive. School systems in the South (ironically more integrated at that point than many in the North) restructured themselves to comply. Students were bused across cities. New assignment plans reshaped how children moved through school systems.
But the success was fragile. In many white communities, there was loud and strategic resistance. Some white families pulled their children out of public schools entirely. Others moved to suburban districts beyond the reach of desegregation orders. As white enrollment dropped, so did political support for integration.
Over time, courts began to back away from Swann’s boldness. Judges began to treat desegregation as a temporary emergency rather than a structural transformation. The legal tools of integration began to erode.
Segregation by Another Name
Even when schools were legally integrated on maps and enrollment forms, the habits and hierarchies of segregation often persisted.
Tracking systems sorted students into advanced or remedial groups, often along racial lines, regardless of actual ability
Disciplinary policies punished Black students more harshly for the same behaviors
School closures disproportionately affected Black communities, eliminating historically Black schools and displacing students and teachers
Funding gaps continued to drain resources from majority-Black schools
These weren’t remnants of a bygone era. They were adaptations; new forms of inequality shaped to survive a changed legal landscape. And they proved that desegregation wasn’t just about moving students around but also about transforming power structures that ran deep.
Courts Pull Back
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, courts were willing to push. They allowed busing. They approved redistricting. They called out sham compliance.
But over time, that willingness faded.
White resistance grew more organized and more politically powerful. In some cities, white families withdrew en masse from public schools, enrolling their children in private “segregation academies” or moving to suburban districts with little racial diversity. These shifts drained public schools of both funding and political support.
Faced with backlash and fatigue, courts grew more cautious. Judges began to frame desegregation as a temporary emergency, not an ongoing obligation. They emphasized local control. They treated racial disparities as unfortunate but unintentional. In effect, they said: we’ve done enough.
That shift from active enforcement to gradual retreat marked a turning point. The Court was no longer asking what was needed to repair segregation. It was asking what was needed to declare it over.
Beyond the South: Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973)
People often associate segregation with the Deep South. But by the 1970s, attention shifted to cities like Denver, Detroit, and Boston—places where segregation wasn’t written into law, but baked into housing patterns and school zones.
In Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), the Court asked a new question:
If one part of a school district is intentionally segregated, can courts presume the rest is too?
The majority said yes: if you find intentional segregation anywhere, it casts doubt on the whole system. The burden shifts to the district to prove that the rest wasn’t also shaped by discriminatory decisions.
This was a major shift because it allowed courts to take on patterns, not just isolated policies.
But Keyes also marked the beginning of a more cautious approach. In the dissent, some justices worried that the Court was overreaching, punishing districts without clear evidence of widespread intent. The opinion acknowledged how hard it is to distinguish between government policy and “natural” segregation driven by housing, wealth, and race.
It was a glimpse of the road ahead: the legal tools of desegregation were growing weaker, even as the problem remained deeply rooted.
Final Thoughts: Declaring Rights vs. Delivering Them
Brown v. Board didn’t fail. But it didn’t succeed on its own.
The decision had to be enforced by presidents, reinforced by Congress, and expanded by future courts. It had to overcome closed doors, angry mobs, legal loopholes, and local resistance. It had to confront the quiet, stubborn fact that schools often reflect the segregation of the neighborhoods around them.
And even when schools were legally integrated, the habits and hierarchies of segregation remained, e.g., disciplinary policies, school closures, and funding gaps.
Declaring a right is only the beginning.
Delivering it takes everything else.
What does it take to make a right real?