The Harm and Benefit Thesis

White charter school enclaves — defined as charter schools located in school districts that are thirty percent or less white, but that enroll a student body that is fifty percent or greater white — are emerging across the country. The emergence of white charter school enclaves is the result of a sobering but ugly truth: when given a choice, white parents as a collective tend to choose racially segregated, predominately white schools. Empirical research supports this claim. Empirical research also demonstrates that white parents as a collective will make that choice even when presented with the option of a more racially diverse school that is of good academic quality. Despite the connection between collective white parental choice and school segregation, greater choice continues to be injected into the school assignment process. School choice assignment policies, particularly charter schools, are proliferating at a substantial rate. As a result, parental choice rather than systemic design is creating new patterns of racial segregation and inequality in public schools. Yet the Supreme Court’s school desegregation jurisprudence insulates from legal scrutiny racial segregation in schools ostensibly caused by parental choice rather than systemic design. Consequently, the new patterns of racial segregation in public schools caused by collective white parental choice are largely escaping regulation by courts. This article argues that the time has come to reconsider the legal and normative viability of regulating racial segregation in public schools caused by collective white parental choice. The article makes two important contributions to the legal literature on school desegregation. First, using white charter school enclaves as an example, it documents the ways in which school choice policies are being used to allow whites as a collective to satisfy their preference for segregated predominately white schools. Second, the article sets forth both constitutional and normative arguments for regulating the private choices that result in stark racial segregation patterns in public schools.

The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board found state-imposed segregation of public schools in violation of the U. S. Constitution; however, implementing this ruling in thousands of local school districts required local plaintiffs, money, and data. A decade passed without significant school desegregation. In 1964, Congress enacted a comprehensive Civil Rights Act that authorized the U.S. Attorney General to bring legal action against segregated school systems on behalf of plaintiffs seeking school desegregation, free of charge; and authorized the Department of Education to collect data on school enrollment by race, making it possible to prove in a court of law the existence of racial segregation. This article provides information about the value and importance of the Act in the elimination of state-imposed school segregation. African Americans in segregated schools received the assistance necessary to prevail in district federal courts, and many cases were argued in Circuit Courts of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the United States Supreme Court declared that state-imposed racially segregated public elementary and secondary education was unconstitutional. The Brown decision accomplished more than the recognition that education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments in its declaration that segregation had deprived minority children of educational opportunities in violation of their right under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Brown forms the cornerstone for subsequent legal developments. Brown served as the primary motivating force for the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964, which outlawed the poll tax and literacy tests for voting. Designed to enforce the 14 Amendment, enacted in 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 attacked segregation in public accommodations, employment, and education. A year later, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and three years later the Fair Housing Act in 1968. More than two decades later, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that overturned five U.S. Supreme Court decisions, making it more difficult to bring discrimination suits against public agencies. This 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most important remedy for implementing Brown, granted the U.S. Attorney General the power and authority to bring suits on behalf of Black plaintiffs in thousands of school districts operating racially segregated public elementary and secondary schools. The 1964 Act also gave the U.S. secretary of Education the authority to collect data to document implementation of Brown and provide grants to school district to assist with school desegregation efforts. The data collection efforts provided data to plaintiffs in school desegregation cases with evidence of a lack of school desegregation in offending school districts. Prior to the 1964 Act, it was difficult to secure plaintiffs in hundreds of racially segregated school district for fear of reprisals by southern communities. To bring a suit against a southern school district to desegregate, plaintiffs also needed to employ a local state attorney, which was difficult in most cases. The plaintiffs and the local attorney could suffer a lost of employment and suffer physical harm. The Acts granting the Attorney General the authority to bring suits solved these problems for many school suits in small rural communities. Also, the all due deliberate speed for implementing Brown outlined in Brown II in 1955 suggested to the federal district courts that it was okay to go slow with school desegregation or do nothing; moreover, Congress did not send a positive signal to the district courts until 1964 with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court waited 14 years after Brown to send the lower courts a signal to accelerate school desegregation in a Virginia case, Green v. …

The issue of residential segregation has had a long history in the development of school desegregation laws and policies. Most social scientists and jurists would agree that school segregation is closely associated with racial segregation in housing, particularly in larger school systems. Residential segregation can give rise to school segregation between school systems, such as that existing between a predominantly minority city school system and its predominantly white suburban systems, and within a single school system when a neighborhood school policy reflects segregated residential patterns. The debate over the relationship between housing and school segregation arises, however, not from the mere fact of association, but from the causal interpretations applied to this association. Two major issues have framed the debates over this relationship. One issue concerns the causes of housing segregation itself, whether it arises primarily from discriminatory actions, either public or private, or from a complex set of social, economic, and demographic forces in which discrimination plays only a secondary role. The second issue focuses on the causal connections between school segregation and housing segregation and the direction of the causal relationship: the extent to which a neighborhood school policy actually contributes to housing segregation (rather than simply reflecting it) and the extent to which school desegregation contributes to integrated housing choices. On these points there is sharp disagreement between and within the social science and legal communities. The debates within the social science and legal communities have had reciprocating influences. On the one hand, a considerable amount of research on housing segregation has been generated by school desegregation litigation. On the other, a number of court decisions about the role of housing in school desegregation cases have been influenced by social science research and expert testimony. Thus the relationship between judicial policy and social science research is well illustrated by the housing segregation issue. The role of residential segregation in school desegregation law has itself passed through several stages during the past thirty years of school desegregation litigation.

In the first 25 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down more than thirty cases involving desegregation of public school systems. Yet, over the past quarter of a century, the Court has not played much of a role in ensuring educational equity when dealing with segregated schools, resolving only six cases. The Court's lack of involvement in desegregation efforts has undoubtedly contributed to the fact that many school boards act as if Brown had never been decided. After reflecting on the status of school desegregation, the article concludes that while the Supreme Court and lower federal courts contributed a great deal toward the dismantling of desegregated school systems in the first 25 years after Brown, their actions in the last 25 years resulted in a situation of having the nation taking one step forward and half of a step backwards, because the very conditions that Brown sought to eliminate are unfortunately returning to the public schools. One can only hope that as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Brown, the Court will remain true to the spirit of this landmark case and its progeny by safeguarding equal educational opportunities for all students. INTRODUCTION On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided its most important education case, perhaps its most significant ruling, of all time. In a unanimous nine-to-nothing opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) (Brown I), the Court held that the de jure segregation of public schools based on race deprived minority children of equal educational opportunities in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A year later, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1955) (Brown II), the Court set about dismantling segregated school systems. While later cases attacked de facto and de jure segregation in schools as well as the wider arena of American society, Brown I remains the unchallenged catalyst for judicially initiated systemic change. Beginning with school desegregation and culminating in the Civil Rights Movement, Brown spawned an era of equal educational opportunities by heightening consciousness for protecting the rights of other disenfranchised groups, most notably women and students with disabilities. In the first twenty-five years after Brown, the Supreme Court handed down more than 30 cases involving desegregation of public school systems (Russo, Harris, & Sandidge, 1994). Yet, over the past quarter of a century, the Supreme Court has played a diminished role in ensuring educational equity, resolving only six cases. The Court's lack of involvement in desegregation efforts has undoubtedly contributed to the fact that many school boards act as if Brown had never been decided. One can only hope that as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of Brown, the Court will remain true to the spirit of this landmark case and its progeny by safeguarding equal educational opportunities for all students. Ten years ago, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Brown, this author and others (Russo, Harris, & Sandidge, 1994) reviewed more than three dozen cases on public school desegregation that the Court resolved in the 40 years since Brown I. Rather than cover the same ground, the essential purpose of this article is to pick up where the last one ended. The first and larger part of this article reviews litigation in the federal courts dealing with desegregation. The initial section of legal analysis reviews Supreme Court cases from the 1990s before examining lower federal court cases after the Court last acted, focusing on disputes over whether formerly segregated school systems achieved unitary. The latter part of the legal analysis highlights cases on unitary status because only by creating school systems that operate in such a fashion, meaning that schools function without regard to segregation by race by serving all children, can educators create the necessary pre-conditions for academic success. …

The Segregated Schooling of Blacks in the Southern United States and South Africa

Dans cet article, l'auteur se propose d'analyser les similitudes dans l'education des Afro-americains et sud-africains noirs durant les periodes de segregation et d'Apartheid. La nature de l'oppression en milieu scolaire permet de lier les approches des Etats-Unis et de l'Afrique du Sud en matiere d'education pour les populations visees ainsi que l'usage par les communautes noires, dans ces deux contextes, de l'education comme ascenseur social, permettant de depasser les limites imposees par la segregation. Il est a noter egalement les strategies identiques, dans ces deux environnements, mises en place par les parents, les chefs d'etablissements et les enseignants pour encourager les eleves a depasser le contexte de l'oppression...

SEGREGATION RECEIVED MORE INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM than any other area of U.S. race relations in the post-World War II period. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations' racial reforms were a response not only to an increasingly effective civil rights movement in the U.S. South but also to international politics. Segregation hindered appeals to potential allies in competition with the Soviet bloc. So in its famous 1947 report President Truman's committee on civil rights concluded: Our position in the postwar world is so vital to the future that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects. . . . [T]he treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned peoples. . . . We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. . . . The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.1 Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, cared little about black rights per se, but he was acutely conscious of the same connection. School segregation has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere, he warned the attorney general in 1952.2 The State Department used particularly strong language in its amicus brief for the Brown case, argued in December 1952. During the past six years, the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater. The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations. . . . [T]he undeniable existence of racial discrimination gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare. . . . [T]he view is expressed that the United States is hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country. . . . Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. . . . [R]acial discrimination remains a source of embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. . . . [I]t jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.3 The president's statements also bear the imprint of international pressure. As historian Richard Dalfiume notes, just about every speech . . . [Harry Truman] made on the civil rights issue . . . always brings up this point: The rest of the world is watching us. We must put our own house in order. The Truman administration's efforts to desegregate the armed forces and commit the Democratic party to black rights in 1948 must in part be understood as serving Cold War motives.4 The Eisenhower administration moved reluctantly in its first term. But in the second term, the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, widely publicized discriminatory sentences by southern state courts, the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, and, most dramatically, southern defiance of federal school desegregation orders all generated negative international publicity.5 At the Bandung Conference of 1955, representatives from Africa and Asia denounced western racism. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, when the U.S. delegation to the United Nations pushed for sanctions against the Soviet Union, several foreign governments responded that the American government violated the civil and human rights of its own colored citizens.6 A similar response greeted U.S. efforts during the Berlin crisis of 1948-1949. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even suggested at one point that the U.S. government's refusal to take a firm stand against South Africa's apartheid policy grew out of a fear of being charged with hypocrisy.7 While the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision helped improve America's image abroad, defiance of the decision attracted world-wide attention and resulted in a new round of criticism. …

haps more litigation, legislation, administrative action, rhetoric, and controversy than all other areas of civil rights combined. Yet, by all signs, the struggle to desegregate schools has only begun. The struggle will continue because progress in school desegregation has been limited and because difficult questions and problems raised by school segregation in metropolitan areas and in northern school districts are beginning to be dealt with only now. This article has a single thesis: that school desegregation can be achieved in all American communities and that successful school desegregation will ultimately have positive consequences for American society. In an effort to establish the validity of this thesis, this article will (X) review the progress of school desegregation to identify the areas in which this conflict must expand in the future if full school desegregation is to be achieved; (2) identify the factors that have limited progress to suggest the obstacles which must be overcome if progress is to continue; and (3) assess the current standards of the Supreme Court on school desegregation and speculate on the implications of these standards for

Like most issues stimulated by the civil rights movement over the past four decades, the tangled web of policy questions associated with school desegregation defies easy resolution. The debate over desegregation policy has touched upon many aspects and levels of human society, including values, law, education, and social theory; therefore, arriving a succinct set of policy conclusions, especially one accompanied by substantial consensus, is unrealistic. The debate cannot and should not be reduced simply to a matter of law, to ideological differences, or to disagreements over social science theories. Any attempt to oversimplify the desegregation issue does injustice to those with the greatest stake in its outcome, namely, the students, parents, and educators who reap its rewards and shoulder its costs. Adding to this complexity is the fact that desegregation issues have shifted so much over time that the important policy questions differ from one decade to the next. During the 1950s, the legal and value debate was over compulsory segregation, and social theorists debated whether separate schools were harmful or beneficial for children. During the 1970s, the legal and value debate shifted to compulsory desegregation and whether the benefits of mandatory busing justified its deep divisiveness and its unintended consequences. During the 1990s the debate has shifted once again, this time in several directions. The federal courts struggle with the conditions under which to grant unitary status (and dismissal) to school districts with court-ordered desegregation plans. Surprisingly, considering the great controversy in the 1970s, school boards in the 1990s debate whether to seek unitary status or, if not under court order, to adopt desegregation plans on their own. Civil rights groups are back in court, not only to oppose unitary status but also to demand even broader remedies than those granted during the 1970s. They have requested metropolitan remedies between cities and suburbs, and they have petitioned for racial parity in classrooms, discipline rates, and even academic achievement. Ironically, some of these latest court challenges have come full circle, invoking the psychological harm thesis of Brown that most legal scholars dismissed as irrelevant to the law.

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life. (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that 'The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation. (2) Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy. It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3) One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference. Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. …

Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's Racial Crisis. Washington: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1997. Pp. xi & 231. $24.00. Bill Ong Hing, To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+205. $29.95. The revelation that the Black Leadership Forum, a coalition of liberal civil rights groups, played a major role in the settlement in November 1997 of Piscataway Township Board of Education v. Taxman, just weeks before arguments were scheduled to begin before the U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most visible signs that the retrenchment of affirmative action is reaching a crisis point. At issue in the Piscataway case was the policy of the local board of education to prefer minority teachers over nonminority teachers in layoff decisions in circumstances where the teachers had the same qualifications and seniority. The principaljustification the board of education provided for this policy is that it serves the goal of promoting racial diversity. The Third Circuit Court ruled in 1996 that this policy violated Title VII in the case of a laid-off white teacher, Sharon Taxman. The Supreme Court in June 1997 agreed to hear the appeal. The settlement involved a payment of $433,500 in back pay, damages, and legal fees to Taxman. Significantly, the Black Leadership Forum agreed to raise $308,500 of that amount in order to avoid the Supreme Court's making a ruling based on this case, even though the Forum was not a party in the case (New York Times, 23 Nov. 1997, p. 1). Although the idea of a third party paying 70% of a settlement is practically unheard of, the motives behind the Black Leadership Forum's actions are not difficult to discern. The first stems from the perception that the school board's case in Piscataway was extremely weak. The fear of civil rights groups was not simply that the decision of the Third Circuit would be upheld but that the Supreme Court would provide a general ruling against affirmative action programs based on the goal of diversity except when employers admitted to prior discriminatory practices. If the Supreme Court is going to consider such a move and, in effect, overturn the legal standards set in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), it would be better for civil rights groups if the case before the Court is a very strong one. The second motive is to buy time. Putting off a major ruling on affirmative action by the Supreme Court is significant in two important respects. First of all, it allows for the possibility of a change in personnel on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Rehnquist will retire by 1999, creating the possibility for President Clinton or his successor to appoint a new justice as well as a new Chief Justice who may be more favorably inclined to rule in favor of affirmative action. Second, time allows civil rights groups and others to rethink the theoretical basis for affirmative action. The point, as settlement of the Piscataway case makes vividly clear, is that the next little while is critical in an effort to reestablish in the mind of the public why social justice requires the presence of affirmative action programs for visible minorities, especially African Americans, in the contemporary United States and how those programs conform to prevailing standards of fairness. What the settlement in Piscataway bought, in other words, is a narrow window of opportunity to influence in a positive way how the Supreme Court justices view affirmative action. For the purposes of this review, I shall understand affirmative action to mean the following: An affirmative action program seeks to remedy the significant underrepresentation of members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups through measures that take group membership or identity into account (Brest & Oshige 1995:856). The broader intellectual context is that conservative critics of affirmative action have achieved significant legal and political victories. …

The shift away from school desegregation policies toward market-based reforms necessitates a deeper understanding of the social and institutional forces driving contemporary school segregation. The author conceptualizes school segregation as a mode of monopolistic closure amid status competition, where racial/ethnic groups compete for school-based status and resources. He tests the theory by analyzing primary and secondary school segregation throughout the United States from 1993 to 2010. Findings support the hypotheses that segregation increases with the salience of race/ethnicity and the decentralization of school systems, which fuels differentiation and provides incentives and opportunities to monopolize schools. Parallel findings for black-white, Hispanic-white, and black-Hispanic segregation suggest that a core set of processes drives school segregation as a general phenomenon.

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A <i>Comcast</i> Case Study

Dennis R. Judd, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis* This article explains how local, state, and federal governments have exacerbated or failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision in Liddell v. Board of Education The court ruled then that both the policies of the city school board and governmental housing policies had contributed to racial segregation in the city's schools. The author presents a comprehensive review of socioeconomic and political issues related to housing segregation in the St. Louis region, and offers five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement in the region. INTRODUCTION In the 1977 Craton Liddell et al. v. the Board of Education of the City of St. Louis, Missouri et al. trial, the board of education (BOE) of the city of St. Louis argued that racial imbalance in that city's schools existed because of resegregative factors associated with governmental housing policies, and not because of school policies administered by the school board. In rejecting this argument in 1981, the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that the policies of the school board contributed to racial segregation in the schools. The court also recognized that governmental housing policies had played an important contributing role, basing its conclusions in this regard primarily on the report of its independent housing expert, Gary Orfield.1 Orfield's comprehensive 153-page report, submitted on April 21, 1981, provided strong that federally assisted housing has, over time, tended to resegregate African American populations. The court subsequently ordered the state of Missouri, the United States, the city of St. Louis, and the BOE to develop a plan to ensure that housing programs would facilitate school desegregation. Though such a plan was drawn up, the state of Missouri refused to participate, and the plan was never implemented. Nearly two decades later, federally assisted housing yields the same effect, despite changes in policies at the federal level. The long-term pattern of local resistance to racial integration in the St. Louis region has continued unchanged. Governments at all levels have continued to pursue policies that have promoted racial segregation in housing, in St. Louis and elsewhere, and they have failed to enact policies that would have the effect of reducing such segregation. The effect of this governmental complicity and inaction is that the St. Louis metropolitan area remains highly segregated. The conditions of residential segregation documented in 1981 persist to this day. As in the past, segregation in housing continues to amplify school not only in St. Louis but across the nation. Because racial segregation in the schools is directly related to patterns of residential schools in the St. Louis metropolitan area, in many urban areas in the United States, remain highly segregated. In this article, I demonstrate how, local, state, and federal governments have continued to exacerbate or have failed to take steps to reduce residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area since the District Court's 1981 decision. I also present a comprehensive review of the socioeconomic and political issues related to housing in the St. Louis region, and offer five corrective actions to facilitate fair housing practices, policies, and enforcement across city and county lines. THE LIDDELL CASE In reaching its initial decision in Liddell, the District Court identified St. Louis as an example of 'severe' residential segregation, and noted that evidence of housing segregation in St. Louis is undisputed in the record (Liddell, 1981, p. 1324). The Court further expressed its view that government policies and action have been a major force in developing and maintaining housing discrimination against blacks (p. …

Huck (Hound) and Jim (Crow): Syndicated Television Cartoons and Southern Segregation Christopher P. Lehman In 1953, a Democratic Alabama state legislator named Sam Englehardt, Jr., was worried for the future of segregation. The US Supreme Court had just convened to hear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, and the lawyers advocating for the plaintiffs were proposing that “separate but equal”—the legal principle that served as the foundation of Jim Crow—had no constitutionality in public schools. In addition, the opening remarks in the land’s highest court came just one month after the Republican Party had won national contests in the executive and legislative branches of government, victories achieved when the South was solidly a Democratic region. The country had even elected its first Republican president in two decades. President-Elect Dwight Eisenhower was noncommittal on civil rights, but his two most recent predecessors in the White House had approved desegregation of the defense industry and the US military. Meanwhile, the congressional elections had resulted in a Republican majority after four years of a Democratic Congress. The prospect of the demise of segregation in public schools thus added insult to these injuries for Englehardt and other southern, segregationist Democrats.1 Englehardt sought salvation in the new medium of television. In January 1953, he stood at the Alabama Capitol to deliver a proposal: establish a state-owned television system to broadcast public school curricula into the homes of schoolchildren (effectively, a mid-20th-century version of online education). If the Supreme Court were to ban segregation, all children (but particularly whites) could still receive an education without having to physically attend a desegregated public school. “There would be no problem of segregation if instruction were beamed directly into people’s homes,” he reasoned, with seeming magnanimity. He also called for “TV school reception centers” (akin to the “Internet Cafes” of the late 1990s and early 2000s) across the state for people who could not afford television sets, allowing for even the poorest of children to avoid integration.2 At the time, television stations throughout the country catered to children mainly by providing animated-film entertainment for them. Cartoons were among the earliest programs on the air in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and both black and white children in the segregated South saw them simultaneously, but of course separately. Motion-picture studios offered their animation libraries to television syndication companies, who then contracted with individual television stations for the broadcasting of the films. These programs usually aired on weekday afternoons, and children watched them at home after dismissed from their segregated schools. Most of the cartoons themselves belonged to pre-segregation television culture, filmed in black-and-white instead of [End Page 4] Technicolor—a decade older than the children viewing them on television. The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision in May 1954 became the context in which some people expressed concern for how southern television programming affected its white juvenile viewers, because many young white southerners, often not even in the Deep South, expressed intense hostility about the verdict’s outlawing of segregated public schools. When a new academic year began that fall, European American students of seven schools in southern Delaware boycotted the facilities over integration. Meanwhile, mobs protested and rioted in several cities in West Virginia. The film trade periodical Hollywood Reporter printed a rare political commentary in response, in November, and in doing so the newspaper was one of the few media journals to speak out against the violence. The Reporter warned that stereotyped films caused potential harm to European American children. Noticing a link between “the behavior of these teenage Americans” and “all the agencies contributing to their education,” the periodical asked, “Does the characterization of Negroes in movies and television shows aid or hinder the realization of the Supreme Court’s decision on segregation?” The Reporter specifically named animation as part of the problem. “Negro actors and entertainers…appear often, and in vicious stereotype, in the old movies, shorts, and cartoons that fill the bulk of TV time,” the journal complained, and the “so-called ‘children’s programs,’ which depend on ancient movie product, are the worst offenders...