Where Does School Segregation Stand, 70 Years After Brown v. Board of Education? (2024)

As the United States marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, many of the nation’s classrooms remain racially separate and unequal.

FRONTLINE examined one element of the resurgence of school segregation in the 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal, which was recently released on YouTube for the first time.

The documentary followed a group of mostly white, middle-class residents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, working to carve out a new city — and school district — following concerns that East Baton Rouge Parish District schools were underperforming and dangerous.

Last month, after a 12-year battle, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruledto allow the incorporation of the new city of St. George.

Such school district secession efforts across the country are one of the factors contributing to racial segregation in schools, studies show. As of 2022, more than 18 million American students — one in three — attended K-12 public schools in which a majority of students are of one race or ethnicity, a 10-year government analysis found. Schools that secede from larger districts typically end up less racially diverse, according to the report.

“I think it speaks volumes that decades after ‘separate but equal’ was supposed to end, we still have millions of kids who are attending what are essentially single-race schools,” said Jacqueline Nowicki, director of Education, Workforce and Income Security at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which issued the 2022 report.

A Troubled History

In the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling, the Supreme Court found that the longstanding precedent of “separate but equal” schools for Black and white children was unconstitutional. In the aftermath, many white residents revolted, attacking pro-integration activists and eroding integrated public schools by fleeing the districts, defunding them or closing them altogether.

In the decades that followed, federally mandated busing and ongoing oversight gradually led to more racially diverse American schools.

But when some court orders were lifted in the 1980s and 1990s, studies show, schools began to resegregate. Since then, many factors have contributed to the resurgence of school segregation — including school secession movements.

A ‘Breakaway Movement’ in the Spotlight

Proponents say such efforts create more community-oriented schools and improve their childrens’ education. In the 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal, Norman Browning, a leader of the movement to carve out the City of St. George from Baton Rouge, said, “They’re failing our children because our children are not getting the education they deserve.”

Critics have argued that such efforts reverse hard-fought civil rights gains and leave schools less racially and economically diverse.

“The end result of that is it excludes children, and those children are minority children. Those children are Black children,” Domoine D. Rutledge, then East Baton Rouge Parish school district’s attorney, said in the film. “We have done a full-throttle reversal in this community, and we’re resegregating our school system.”

A 2019 ballot initiative to form the new city of St. George won by 54%. At the time of the vote, the proposed city would have been more than 70% white and less than 15% Black — compared to East Baton Rouge Parish which was around 46.5% Black, according to Census estimates. The city’s boundaries have shifted since then to include 100,000 residents.

Last month, after the Louisiana Supreme Court decision allowing St. George to be incorporated as a city, Andrew Murrell, a leader of the effort, in a statement called the ruling a “culmination of citizens exercising their constitutional rights.” He added, “Now we begin the process of delivering on our promises of a better city.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Baton Rouge branch said in a statement, “The St. George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation.” It also echoed concerns about “potential segregation and unequal resource distribution.”

Baton Rouge leaders said that the new city would take millions in annual tax revenue away from a majority-Black district. The estimates of how much annual tax revenue would be lost vary widely.

As Separate and Unequal reported, St. George advocates argued that the racial and financial implications of their plan were being exaggerated.

“When I read headlines such as the fact that this is nothing but a secession to get away from the low-income citizens, as well as making it a race issue, it’s extremely disturbing to me,” Norman Browning said in the documentary. “This is nothing more than a middle-class community incorporating a city.”

Broader Impacts of Breakaway Movements

The GAO, a non-partisan agency working for Congress, analyzed 10 years of Department of Education data for its 2022 report, which found that carving new school districts out of existing districts led to districts that tended to have more white and Asian American students than Black and Hispanic students, and were generally wealthier than the districts they broke away from.

“When you have a portion that secedes and that portion that is seceding is the wealthier portion, you are obviously leaving fewer resources for the folks that stay behind,” Nowicki, the GAO director, told FRONTLINE. Fewer resources are linked to worse educational outcomes and typically, less access to experienced teachers.

Sherri Doughty, GAO’s assistant director, also noted the “racial composition of those districts changed” one year after seceding.

From school years 2009-10 through 2019-20, GAO identified 36 school districts that seceded from existing districts.

“Thirteen of those secessions were in the South. Nine of those 13 seceding districts were whiter and wealthier than the districts that they seceded from,” Nowicki said.

She added, “Three of the four that were not whiter and wealthier were under active federal desegregation orders or plans,” referring to the fact that some school districts across the country have been federally mandated to increase the racial integration of Black and Latino students. Many of these orders have been lifted over the years.

“We also saw a lot of secessions in the Northeast, but they were smaller ones,” Doughty said, noting that the school carve outs in the South tended to impact a higher number of students.

Meanwhile, the tensions surrounding St. George’s creation continue, with advocates celebrating the chance at what they say will be a better education for their children and better use of their tax dollars, and opponents fearful that civil rights gains will be eroded.

In early May, a Baton Rouge city councilman who previously sued to prevent the incorporation of St. George requested that the state Supreme Court reverse the ruling.

Days later, Gov. Jeff Landry appointed an interim mayor and interim chief of police for St. George.

Erin Texeira contributed to this story.

Watch the full 2014 documentary Separate and Unequal: