You’ll get similar results for Cleveland, OH. It’s not due to overt segregation, but to students going to the school that’s geographically closest to where they live. It’s entirely coincidental, of course, that blacks tend to live in different neighborhoods from whites, and to not be able to afford private schools.
That raises the question of what the ultimate purpose of desegregation was/is. Did we simply want to remove the de jure barrier to a person going to the school of his choice based upon race, or were/are we attempting to enforce social engineering by in effect requiring races to mix in schools, the wishes of the individuals in the community be damned?
I always thought the issue was that the schools that black and other minority students were (de facto or de jure) sent to to be educated were inferior. That they received less funding, had teachers who weren’t as good using equipment that was not as good, using old textbooks, all inside a facility that was old and crumbling and unpleasant to be in.
Brown v Board of Ed ruled that the wrongness of segregation was that “separate but equal” was not, in fact, equal, yes? I think that’s still the case for it: separate would be OK if it weren’t unequal. It still mostly is.
Up here in NY suburban lands, it’s done in part via property tax. The expensive places to live are expensive in part because of high property taxes which in turn get funneled to the schools in the area, which are better schools than the ones that the poor kids elsewhere in the county go to.
Segregation didn’t end in the 1950’s, 1960’s or even 1970’s. It still exists today in some places. I grew up in a tiny town in Louisiana and we had segregation until 1980 when I was in 1st grade. Of course, they didn’t call it that. All you had to do was draw a line literally separated by railroad tracks and make two separate school districts.
However, it didn’t work quite like most people assume. My parents taught at the black school and my grandfather was in charge of integration as President of the School Board when the order came down. He got death threats from both sides and the stress it caused probably contributed to his very early death. Most people, both black and white, were perfectly happy having segregated schools and did not want things to change. It was just a cultural difference and it wasn’t like the facilities for the white students were better than those for the black students. There weren’t very many racial tensions either. Everyone got along for the most part and knew each other. There weren’t many interracial relationships but everything else was integrated. It was just the way things were done.
I don’t want to defend the practice too much but sometimes people make false assumptions about the way things really worked. It wasn’t just a bunch of rednecks that wanted to suppress those niggers. It was mainly just about maintaining dual cultures down to the food served in the cafeterias and everyone getting along in daily life. Lots of people just liked it that way. You can see the same thing in some of the modern day “progressive” movements that talk about things like cultural appropriation.
The numbers would be more meaningful if we knew the percentage of the school age population that was Black. While it is perhaps close to 51%, it could also be a lot higher. If most of the white people in town are older, or have significantly fewer kids, the 84% figure at Tenth Street Elementary might be a fair approximation of the racial make up of the kids in the neighborhood.
This is not how things really worked. White schools were almost always better funded than black schools, and it’s incredibly false to say “everyone got along for the most part” during Jim Crow and segregation. The people who “liked it this way” were almost always white, since white people didn’t have to sit at the back of the bus (or stand to give white people their seats), live in the shittier neighborhoods, be in fear of assaults or lynching if they made the most minor of mistakes, call white people “sir” while white people called them “boy”, live in fear of police, be unable to vote, have little chance in a civil dispute with a white person, etc.
Black people were not treated as full citizens in the Jim Crow South, in almost every way (and this was also true, to various extents, through much of the North). Black people were subject to routine humiliation, degradation, and even violence, and to resist or speak against it was to risk one’s life. The vast majority of white Southerners strongly opposed integration and Civil Rights for black people, according to polling at the time.
You shouldn’t defend it at all, because it was an utterly monstrous system. For a brief period of time after the Civil War, when Reconstruction (and black civil rights) were defended in force by government soldiers, black people in the South were actually treated as full citizens. Then the white majority rebelled with force, lead by the KKK and similar groups, and nearly a century of Jim Crow brutality and dehumanization followed.
Private schools cost money. I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say that white families are more likely to have the wherewithal. Segregation might be going on, but a comparison needs to contrast one variable, not 2 or more.
The public schools you list are all fairly similar in makeup. It may well be there is “white flight” to the private schools, but what exactly do you propose they do to solve that? If the black parents can’t afford to choose the private schools, you can encourage them to provide more scholarships, but I don’t think you can require it.
I grew up in a small South Arkansas town. I assure you they were very serious about segregation in my schools. There wasn’t any ‘oh we get along all separate and suff’. It was illegal to separate children because of color. Our schools were totally segregated by 1972. Because we were in the deep south, there were proportionally more black children, so the percentages may look off kilter.
I live and grew up in Topeka, Kansas, as in the Brown case.
Elementary schools were segregated. But there was only one public high school and all students, of whatever background, attended it
However, sports and social events were still seperate in high school. The Topeka High School mascot was the Trojan. But blacks played on seperate teams and were the Ramblers. Seperate proms too. I’ve seen the pictures in my mom’s yearbook.
My mother was a member of the first hospital nursing school class that had a black classmate. When the girls(and it was all girls, no male students) went to the movies toegether, they sat in the balcony, as their friend and fellow student couldn’t sit down below. If they ordered lunch they couldn’t sit together as their friend couldn’t sit inside, so all the students got takeout instead. There was an article about all this back a few years ago in out newspaper.
Some school counselors tried to move students away from certain lines of study. Mom knew a Hispanic girl in high school, and that girl’s counselor discouraged her from going to nursing school, because “people like you can’t handle it”. The gal did it anyway and when she got her certificate she went back to that counselor and waved it in her face saying “So we can’t handle it can we?”
Even more interesting is Montgomery. There, the various White suburbs have formed and are still forming their own all-White taxpayer-funded school systems.
In the case of Anniston, the White people simply have established their own private school system. It would seem at least some Alabama schools have managed to segregate themselves again.
I think it’s pretty common across the US, not just Alabama. And walk into an “integrated” school cafeteria during lunch some time and see who is sitting with whom.
Anniston is among the top ten school systems in Alabama in per-student spending. Also, the amount it spends per student is higher than the tuition at the other schools mentioned in the OP.
Gosh, I just said, elsewhere on this board, that the whole ‘Whites being Oppressed’ thing was exactly this. White Christian Males saying that everything was great when they were the only ones who got to say how things worked and assign people to their boxes, but now that other people get to choose their own religions, step out of the boxes and actually vote, why, everything has gone to hell and nothing is as you people want it to be.
You might consider how many people are happier to have a say in how things work and be what they want to be instead of what you tell them to be.