The Impact of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision on Postsecondary Participation of African Americans

Abstract

Although specifically directed toward the nation's K-12 Brown v. Board also opened wider the doors of postsecondary education for African Americans. The landmark decision has led to increased enrollment of African American students in predominantly White colleges and universities. Still, 50 years after the Supreme Court's ruling, African Americans are still proportionately underrepresented in these institutions, which are frequently unwelcoming and sometimes even hostile settings. Many Americans, especially those of African descent, thought that a new era was dawning when on May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision declaring that racial segregation in the nation's public schools was unconstitutional. The court's pronouncement, along its subsequent declaration that the decision be implemented with all deliberate speed, offered the impression that school desegregation would be swift and certain. The reality has been quite the opposite. Although some progress toward integration has occurred since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, particularly in the South, across the nation, K-12 schools are still significantly segregated by race. More than 70% of the nation's Black students now attend predominantly minority schools, according to a recent report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard (Orfield, 2001). In the last decade of the 20th century, the percentage of White students attending public schools Black students actually decreased since 1988, and the figure was lower in 2000 than in 1970. At the start of the 21st century, the top 27 largest school systems were overwhelmingly non-White and segregated (Williams, 2003). While the text of the Brown decision was about segregation at the elementary and secondary school level, the subtext was about justice and equality throughout the educational arena and the entire social system. So, as the Court decision began to be applied at the postsecondary level, the doors of colleges and universities that had been closed to African Americans were also flung open. As we examine the result of the Court's ruling 50 years later, aggregate enrollment patterns in the nation's colleges and universities appear to show quite a different outcome than in the K-12 schools. At the time of the Brown decision, segregation was as pervasive in the nation's colleges and universities as it was in the K-12 systems, and nearly all African American students received their undergraduate education in the nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). However, by the end of the 20th century, the great majority of these students were enrolled in postsecondary institutions that are predominantly White. On that basis, one could argue that the student enrollment figures suggest that racial integration has been more extensive, and, thus, ostensibly more effective at the collegiate level than at the K-12 level. A dramatic increase in the enrollment of African American students in colleges and universities took place during the second half of the 20th century, and a similar situation occurred for other groups of color, whereas enrollment peaked for Whites in the early 1991. For African Americans, the figures vacillated somewhat in the mid 1980s from the level that had been reached at the beginning of the decade, but, by 1987, their numbers and those of other students of color enrolled in the nation's colleges and universities were moving upward in a steady and consistent fashion, and they have continued to do so. Fifty percent more African Americans were matriculated in postsecondary institutions in 2001, compared to twenty years earlier. Over the last two decades of the 20th century, the rate of growth for African American enrollment was more than double the growth rate of White students, and, specifically, during the last decade of the century, the rate of increase accelerated to a level that was three times higher than that of Whites. …