This report provides a preliminary overview of the results of an ongoing project that has two main components.  The first is to develop a complete inventory of school segregation court decisions since 1950.  The second is to analyze the trends in segregation over several decades and to examine how they were affected by court-ordered desegregation and what has been the enduring impact of legal actions during Civil Rights era.

The inventory is still in progress.  An initial list was provided by the Department of Justice, identifying still-active cases in 1997 and 2000 to which it was a party.  The NAACP Legal Defense Fund supplied another list of their current cases.  Other published sources are From Brown to Boston: Desegregation in Education 1954-1974 (edited by Leon Jones, 1979); Desegregation in Education: A Directory of Reported Federal Decisions (edited by Michael Wise, 1977); and New Evidence on School Desegregation (Finis Welch and Audrey Light, 1987). 

Aside from formal court cases, the Mumford Center is also compiling information about school districts that implemented desegregation plans in response to pressure from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.  The analysis in this report incorporates partial information on those plans, based on lists compiled by HEW for the years 1977 and 1978 (School Desegregation: A Report of State and Federal Judicial and Administrative Activity, by the National Institute of Education, HEW 1977, 1978.).

Every case has been checked through legal databases, including Westlaw, to determine the name of the case, the school districts involved, whether the case actually included the issue of school segregation, whether there was a court-mandated desegregation plan, and the year of the initial court order.  We continue to review the inventory to check whether cases have been properly coded.  The case inventory now includes 358 court cases resulting in desegregation plans, involving more than 850 school districts as defendants, and 207 districts that were under pressure from HEW through 1978.

Information on school district racial and ethnic composition and levels of segregation is drawn from two sources, both of which refer specifically to public school children in the elementary grades.  For the school years 1989-90 and 1999-2000, these data were provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).  For school years 1968-69, 1969-70, and 1970-71, data were provided by Dr. Franklin Wilson and Dr. Karl Taeuber of the University of Wisconsin.  If available, we use 1968-69 data here; otherwise we substitute one of the two subsequent years as the “base year?for the analysis. 

For convenience in the following text and tables, ?968?refers to one of the years in the 1968-70 period, ?990?refers to the 1989-90 school year, and ?000? refers to the 1999-2000 school year.