De jure vs. de facto segregation: The false de stinction

In fifth grade, our class celebrated Black History Month by making poster presentations about a “key figure” in the Civil Rights Movement. My poster was about Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all-white school in the South. My classmates made posters about activists like MLK Jr, Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, and the Little Rock Nine. Whoever the person, our goal was to share about their work towards desegregation in the South. Looking back on it, I think you would be hard pressed to find one poster in our class of about 25 kids that didn’t paint the Civil Rights Movement to be a struggle of the South. My fifth grade class is not the only group to fail to recognize the racial discrimination, and activism, that occurred in all other regions of our country as well. In the words of Theoharis, “The country, then and now, fixated on the problem in the South, framing racial injustice as a regional sickness rather than a national malady.”

Even though they did not—and continue to not—get as much public attention as their Southern counterparts, there were just as many individuals fighting for the desegregation of schools and equal educational opportunities in the North. In New York City, Black and Latino students were often forced to attend overcrowded, underfunded schools. When the overcrowding became too much to continue to ignore, local officials switched these schools to half day schedules rather than integrating Black and Latino students into predominantly white schools. And, in fact, in the decade following the Brown v. Board decision, segregation in New York schools actually worsened (Theoharis). The underfunded, lower-quality education children of color were receiving in Northern cities like New York and Boston was justified because of “de facto segregation”—that is, the idea that there was no law that kept these children segregated, it just became that way “by accident.” This was seen as more innocent than the “de jure segregation” of the South, which was maintained by law. Although, as Theoharis points out, this is a “false distinction,” and the “de facto segregation” helped lawmakers in the North find loopholes to keep their schools segregated.

The use of “coded language” was one tactic used by Northern white liberals to avoid accusations of racism, even while they were actively working against the desegregation of their schools. In New York, Superintendent of Schools William Jansen instructed his staff to refer to the schools as “separated” or “racially imbalanced” instead of “segregated” (Theoharis). In Boston, instead of calling it what it was (a white resistance to ending racial gerrymandering and segregated schools), individuals opposed to desegregation claimed they were pro-“neighborhood schools” and said their concerns were about a “busing crisis” (Theoharis). This phrasing was strategically used to deflect any blame from the white liberals who were against desegregation. Further, these less harsh terms were used to “appease Northern sensibilities”—or, in other words, help anti-segregation Northerners not feel guilty about their standpoint, even when they could see firsthand the detrimental effects segregation had on the children of color within their cities.

Before reading Theoharis’s article, I will admit that I was naive about the prevalence of civil rights struggles in major Northern cities like New York and Boston. I know that racial discrimination was—and continues to be—present everywhere. However, because I tend to associate school segregation with cities like Little Rock, AR and Birmingham, AL, I was under the impression that Northern schools were either 1) less segregated to begin with, or 2) initially more compliant with desegregation efforts. Although, I am not surprised by the use of coded language. As seen in modern fights for equity, language is a powerful—and sometimes misused—tool. Especially now that I have learned more about segregation in the New York City and Boston school districts, I would be curious to learn about school segregation in the Midwest. I am assuming there was at least some extent of segregation within school systems here, but I find it very interesting it isn’t something we are explicitly taught about—even during discussions of the Civil Rights Movement and our country’s history of racial discrimination.