Erika Wilson's forthcoming article, The New School Segregation, has been accepted for publication in the Cornell Law Review. I was lucky enough to get an advance look at it. It warns that that the recent school district secessions in places like Memphis, Baton Rouge, and Jefferson County, Alabama, are not aberrational at all, but rather the current evolution of a long and sordid history of resistance to integration. It is a must read for those concerned with the future of school integration, not just the past. The current draft is here on ssrn. She offers this abstract:
The South has a long and sordid history of resisting school desegregation. Yet after a long and vigorous legal fight, by the mid-1980’s, schools in the South eventually became among the most desegregated in the country. An important but often under appreciated tool that aided in the fight to desegregate schools in the South was the strategic use of school district boundary lines. Many school systems in the South deliberately eschewed drawing school district boundary lines around municipalities, and instead drew them around counties. The resulting county-based system of school districts allowed for the introduction of school assignment plans that crossed racially- and economically-segregated municipal boundary lines.