Education segregation in Wisconsin

Last updated

Wisconsin has some of the most segregated schools in the United States. Despite laws demanding school integration, a 2012 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that Wisconsin still has significant segregation in its classrooms.

School integration in the United States Racial desegregation process

School integration in the United States is the process of ending race-based segregation, also known as desegregation, within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains a relevant issue in discussions about modern education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.

The Civil Rights Project/ El Proyecto de CRP, originally named The Civil Rights Project, is a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. In January 2007, The Civil Rights Project moved from Harvard University to the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.

Contents

Almost half of black students in Wisconsin attend a school where 90% or more of the students are non-white.

Background

Wisconsin became a state in 1848. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legitimized separate but equal as national policy.

Wisconsin A north-central state of the United States of America

Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States, in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin is the 23rd largest state by total area and the 20th most populous. The state capital is Madison, and its largest city is Milwaukee, which is located on the western shore of Lake Michigan. The state is divided into 72 counties.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the lone dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan.

After Brown v. Board of Education , the state still needed a legal push. Amos, et al. v. Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee (1965) was the beginning in Wisconsin.

<i>Brown v. Board of Education</i> United States Supreme Court case

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that American state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

National policy came in 1971 in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education which relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The federal answer was court-ordered busing. Meanwhile, Amos was appealed in 1976, and ended up in the United States Supreme Court as Brennan v. Armstrong (1977). The decision of the circuit court of appeals was remanded back to the original court. Finally, United States District Judge John W. Reynolds Jr. oversaw a five-year plan for the Milwaukee school Board to desegregate the schools. In Wisconsin, busing began in 1981. [1]

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools. The Court held that busing was an appropriate remedy for the problem of racial imbalance in schools, even when the imbalance resulted from the selection of students based on geographic proximity to the school rather than from deliberate assignment based on race. This was done to ensure the schools would be "properly" integrated and that all students would receive equal educational opportunities regardless of their race.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 legislation

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and U.S. labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

Desegregation busing in the United States is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools so as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics.

Demographics

Citizens of Wisconsin describe themselves as being more white than the rest of the country. In the 2010 Census, 86.2% reported being white, compared with 73.8 for the nation as a whole.

Wisconsin had never been a slave state. The 1860 Census reported a state population of 775,881. [2] Of those, 1,711 were colored, all free. [3] By 1900, that number had grown only to 2,500. [4] The black population of Wisconsin grew substantially in the 20th century to 6% today.

School demographics

The demographics of schools in Wisconsin reflect the composition of the communities in which they are located. Today, 71% of the state's black population lives in Milwaukee County, where they make up 41% of the population. As a result, the numbers for the rest of the state are skewed by schools in Milwaukee whose percentage is black population is far higher than the rest of the state. [4]

Studies

Since 1996, the relative segregation of classrooms across the United States has been studied by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard until 2007 and subsequently at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.

A 2016 UCLA study showed that 45.3% of black students in Wisconsin attend a school that is 90% or more non-white. Only six states had a higher percentage. [5] [6]

School vouchers

School vouchers were introduced in Milwaukee in 1990. [7] Indiana has one of the largest school voucher programs in the United States. [8] Critics contend that vouchers contribute to school segregation. Analysis of two recent studies on vouchers show that, in one case they do contribute to more segregation, and in the second, they have little effect, with black recipients who had been in a majority-black public school using the vouchers to attend a majority-black private school. [9]

Related Research Articles

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United States following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision.

Separate but equal Legal doctrine used for Racial segregation in the United States

Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law according to which racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia along with his brother-in-law as the leader in the Virginia General Assembly, Democrat Delegate James M. Thomson of Alexandria, to unite white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional.

Segregation academy

Segregation academies were private schools in the Southern United States founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children in desegregated public schools. Often dubbed freedom of choice schools by their proponents, they were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.

Racial segregation in the United States Historical separation of African Americans from American white society

Racial segregation in the United States is the separation of racial groups in aspects of daily life in the history of the United States. For most of United States history, segregation maintained the separation of African Americans from whites. The term also applies to the segregation of racial groups from one another, especially the segregation of people of color from whites.

Joseph Francis Rummel was bishop of the Diocese of Omaha, Nebraska and Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Court's mandate in Brown II. The Court held that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not constitute adequate compliance with the school board's responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis. The Supreme Court mandated that the school board must formulate new plans and steps towards realistically converting to a desegregated system. Green v. County School board of New Kent County was a follow up of Brown v. Board of Education.

Zelma Henderson was the last surviving plaintiff in the 1954 landmark federal school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. The case outlawed segregation nationwide in all of the United States' public schools. The ruling served as a harbinger of the American Civil Rights Movement and paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in all public facilities.

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ordered immediate desegregation of public schools in the American South. It followed 15 years of delays to integrate by most Southern school boards after the Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

Black school educational institutes for black people

Black schools originated under legal segregation in the southern United States after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, in southern states' public policy to keep races separated and maintain white supremacy. In the United States white opposition to African-American success resulted in only the most rudimentary schools for African Americans, as proven by Gebhart v. Belton. It often took decades after the South established public schools for systems to offer education at the high school level. Nonetheless, black teachers and students created some outstanding black high schools, including: Richmond Colored Normal School in Richmond, Virginia; Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.; Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina; Howard Academy in Ocala, Florida; and the Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior and Senior High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Public schools in New Orleans, Louisiana, were desegregated to a significant degree for a period of almost seven years during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War of the United States. Desegregation of this scale was not seen again in the Southern United States until after the 1954 federal court ruling Brown v. Board of Education established that segregated facilities were unconstitutional.

Education segregation in the Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta region has had the most segregated schools -- and for the longest time -- of any part of the United States. As recently as the 2016-17 school year, East Side High School in Cleveland, Mississippi was practically all black: 359 of 360 students were African-American.

Morgan v. Hennigan was the case that defined the school busing controversy in Boston, Massachusetts during the 1970s. On March 14, 1972, the Boston chapter of the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Boston School Committee on behalf of 14 black parents and 44 children. Tallulah Morgan headed the list of plaintiffs and James Hennigan then chair of the School Committee, was listed as the main defendant.

Racial segregation in Atlanta

Racial segregation in Atlanta has known main phases after the freeing of the slaves in 1865: a period of relative integration of businesses and residences; Jim Crow laws and official residential and de facto business segregation after the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906; blockbusting and black residential expansion starting in the 1950s; and gradual integration from the late 1960s onwards. A recent study conducted by Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, found that Atlanta was the second most segregated city in the U.S. and the most segregated in the South.

School segregation in the United States

School segregation in the United States has a long history. In 1787 African Americans in Boston including Prince Hall campaigned against inequality and discrimination in the city's public schools. They petitioned the state legislature protesting that their taxes support the schooling of white students while there was no public school open to their children. In 1835 a mob attacked and destroyed Noyes Academy, an integrated school in Canaan, New Hampshire founded by abolitionists in New England. In 1849 the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were allowed under the state's constitution. It began in its de jure form in the American South with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century. It is influenced by discrimination in the northern states as well as the history of southern states as slave societies. Patterns of residential segregation and Supreme Court rulings regarding previous school desegregation efforts also have a role.

This is a timeline of the American civil rights movement, a nonviolent freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for African Americans. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally established racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.

Indiana has some of the most segregated schools in the United States. Despite laws demanding school integration since 1949, a 2017 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project and Indiana University found that Indiana still has significant segregation in its classrooms.

References

  1. ↑ Meyers, Scottie Lee (August 10, 2016). "Problems Persist In Milwaukee Public Schools 40 Years After Desegregation". Wisconsin Public Radio. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  2. ↑ "Census 1860". Census. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  3. ↑ "1860 Census" (PDF). US Census. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  4. 1 2 Dwan, Kristin (February 2017). African Americans in Wisconsin A Statistical Overview (PDF) (Third ed.). University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  5. ↑ Orfield, Gary (May 16, 2015). "BROWN AT 62: SCHOOL SEGREGATION BY RACE, POVERTY AND STATE" (PDF). Civil Rights Project-Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  6. ↑ Lee, Jolie (May 15, 2014). "PUBLIC SCHOOLS STILL SEGREGATED". USA Today. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  7. ↑ Sanchez, Claudio (May 16, 2017). "Lessons On Race And Vouchers From Milwaukee". National Public Radio. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  8. ↑ Wang, Stephanie (March 19, 2017). "What's a school voucher? Here's a primer". Indianapolis Star. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
  9. ↑ Bendix, Area (March 22, 2017). "Do Private-School Vouchers Promote Segregation?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 12 December 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.