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Map of school segregation in the U.S. in 2024.

This Map Lets You See How School Segregation Has Changed in Your Hometown

The new interactive tool accompanies a study of school enrollment data, which shows that segregation has worsened in recent decades.
Barack Obama presents Sylvia Mendez with the Medal of Freedom in 2010.

How an 8-Year-Old Hispanic Girl Paved the Way for Desegregation

Sylvia Mendez’s role in setting the stage for Brown v. Board of Education has been forgotten and overlooked.
A high school yearbook photo of Elizabeth Prewitt.

I Never Saw the System

As a white teenager in Charlotte, Elizabeth Prewitt saw mandatory school busing as a personal annoyance. Going to an integrated high school changed that.
Pleasant Plains School in Hertford County, North Carolina, active 1920-1950.

How the Rosenwald Schools Shaped a Generation of Black Leaders

Photographer Andrew Feiler documented how the educational institutions shaped a generation of black leaders.
Black Students Matter demonstrators march through Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020
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My Great-Grandmother Ida B. Wells Left A Legacy Of Activism In Education. We Need That Now.

The gap in education equality is holding America back.

The Firsts

The children who desegregated America.
Protestors standing on a bridge, holding signs.

Why 45% of NYC Public School Students Stayed Home in Protest

Historians say that a major milestone in the history of school integration is often left out of the civil rights story.
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School Interrupted

The movement for school desegregation took some of its first steps with a student strike in rural Virginia. Ed Ayers learns about those who made it happen.

An Attempt to Resegregate Little Rock, of All Places

A battle over local control in a city that was the face of integration shows the extent of the new segregation problem in the U.S.

The Utter Inadequacy of America’s Efforts to Desegregate Schools

In 1966, a group of Boston-area parents and administrators created a busing program called METCO to help desegregate schools.

The Defiant Ones

As young girls, they fought the fierce battle to integrate America’s schools half a century ago.

'Segregation's Constant Gardeners': How White Women Kept Jim Crow Alive

Meet the good white mothers, PTA members, and newspaper columnists who were also committed white supremacists.

The Data Proves That School Segregation Is Getting Worse

This is ultimately a disagreement over how we talk about school segregation.

Will America's Schools Ever Be Desegregated?

Though there are practical obstacles to school integration, it's not an unreachable ideal.

The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools

A major investigation reveals that white parents are leading a secession movement with dire consequences for black children.
Two young women holding up protest signs.

Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 Boycott — In New York City

The largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history was not in Little Rock. Or Selma. Or Montgomery. It happened in New York City.

Modern Segregation

Policies of de jure racial segregation and a history of state-sponsored violence continue to have an impact on African Americans.
Opponents of school desegregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

How Much Had Schools Really Been Desegregated by 1964?

Ten years after 'Brown v. Board of Education', Martin Luther King Jr. condemned how little had changed in the nation's classrooms.
Carver Junior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

How to Keep a School Open

Two Carvers and the fight for fair desegregation.
Photograph of young students getting off a school bus.

Public Schools Really Can Save America

America's public schools were founded on the ideal of uniting rich and poor, but inequality persists due to racial, income, and systemic divides.
Freedom School students sitting in a circle on the ground.
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60 Years Later, Freedom Schools Are Still Radical—and Necessary

The Freedom Schools curriculums developed in 1964 remain urgently needed, especially in our era of book bans and backlash.
Black student looking up at a school bus full of white children.

The Boston ‘Busing Crisis’ Was Never About Busing

Five decades after the desegregation effort, a civil-rights scholar questions its framing.
Children protesting before the Supreme Court with a sign that reads "We Love School Choice."

The Post-Brown Realignment and the Structure of Partitioned Publics

Public schools are crucial infrastructures of the reproduction of social inequality and the US carceral state.
State troopers and deputies stand at the entrance to a University of Alabama building in Tuscaloosa on the day in 1963 that George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, said he would defy a Federal order making it mandatory to admit two African American students.
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We Must Remember Tuscaloosa's 'Bloody Tuesday'

Black citizens fought for justice and were met with violence. They persevered.

‘Brown’ at 70

The rhetorically modest but functionally powerful ruling that ended segregation shouldn’t be misused to forestall other efforts at racial equality.
Collage of photos of the Briggs family and the Brown family.

The Price of Being First: Effort to Rename Brown v. Board Reveals Family’s Pain

A failed quest to rename the famed school desegregation case for the South Carolina family who filed first is about more than legal recognition.
Black students walking a gauntlet of white students to enter Clinton High School.

Why Did They Bomb Clinton High School?

It was the first Southern school to be integrated by court order, and the town reluctantly prepared to comply. Then an acolyte of Ezra Pound’s showed up.
School buses.
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Why Are Schools Still Segregated? The Broken Promise of Brown v. Board of Education

The Brown v. Board of Education ruling opened the floodgates for busing across the country, but what happened when the buses stopped rolling?
A photograph of Dennis Lehane next to the cover of his book, Small Mercies.

The Other South

Coming to terms with Boston’s racist legacy in “Small Mercies."
An 18th-century building travels Feb. 10 from its location on the campus of William & Mary to Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area.
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Schools for Black American Children Predated the Revolution

Efforts in early America to educate Black children offer us a template for addressing educational inequality today.

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