Time for a New Civil Rights Movement by Dr. Gary Orfield

MAY 24 2018

Time for a New Civil Rights Movement

Author 

Gary Orfield

This blog [from the Learning Policy Institute] is part of the series, 

Education and the Path to Equity, examining 

issues of education and equity 5 decades after the Kerner Commission 

issued its seminal report on racial division and disparities in the United 

States.

Fifty years ago, a presidential commission warned that the country was coming apart, predicting that it could become two separate and profoundly unequal societies. However, the Kerner Commission’s powerful report had little impact. Its warning came as Republicans made a historic decision to embrace the Southern segregationists and create a new national coalition based on fear of social change. They won, and 1968 was a turning point.

President Richard Nixon was sworn in on a law-and-order platform, exploiting fear of Black violence, and quickly turned the Supreme Court around with four appointments. No Democratic president would name a justice for almost a quarter-century. The court that had helped spark the Southern civil rights revolution soon became the place where civil rights were interpreted away.

The War on Poverty and other policies in the 1960s to make education, health care, and housing accessible and affordable to lower income families and people of color were dismantled by conservatives. Efforts to expand desegregation from the South to the North and West became critically limited in 1974 by a changed Supreme Court. Reagan ended a proven program supporting successful interracial schools and asked the courts to end other desegregation plans.

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A half-century ago, it was already obvious to civil rights groups and the courts that simply forbidding discrimination could not change deeply rooted social practices. A conscious plan to improve opportunities and measure the results was needed. In school desegregation court orders, this meant actually assigning both students and teachers to populate and sustain substantially integrated schools—a policy that produced decades of progress. Plans for military integration, carried out very seriously after severe racial problems in the Vietnam War, were among the most comprehensive and successful. Affirmative action practices improved opportunities for people of color in education and in business, and Title IX opened doors for women.

The conservative movement fostered a belief that social policy efforts to change race relations were unnecessary and unfair, and reinforced stereotypes blaming minority communities for their own problems. In the 1970s and 1980s, a huge wave of tax cutting at the state and federal levels greatly reduced money for social supports. Aid to colleges was slashed and costs transferred to students and their families.

The American myth is that there were severe racial problems before the 1960s but the great civil rights laws solved them. In truth, while there was historic progress in dismantling the official segregation of the South, profound racial separation and inequality continued in the great cities that were transformed by the Black exodus from the South and, later, by the even larger Latino migration. Both groups faced severe discrimination and segregation. Warnings from Martin Luther King before his assassination and from the authors of the Kerner report about the steps needed to create equal opportunities for urban Blacks were ignored. A large drop in the White birth rate and a huge non-White immigration changed society, even as the tools of civil rights reform were abandoned.

This blog is part of the series, Education and the Path to Equity, examining issues of education and equity. More from the series >

Over the past four decades, we have seen steady conservative pressure to dismantle civil rights in spite of evidence that those policies open doors to opportunity and help build bridges across racial difference. Opponents argue that race-conscious plans are unnecessary or illegal because systemic racial unfairness no longer exists and that the appropriate policy for fighting segregation is to put pressure on institutions and individuals of color to change. Since 1991, the federal courts have dismantled systemic integration policies. Nine states have prohibited affirmative action. Compensatory social and educational policies have also been cut. As inequality deepens because of these policies, the idea that we are a colorblind society in the time of Trump and Black Lives Matter is absurd.

Because there has not been a presidential commission, a major new Supreme Court decision, or a major law expanding racial integration in generations, there has been almost no coherent response to the radical transformation of the nation’s population. We have failed to address the educational needs of the changed society and great financial need among the nation’s young.

Now we have two very large and seriously excluded groups, most living in families too poor to pay for school lunches, in a society with a massive increase in economic inequality. Now we live with a level of incarceration among minorities that is hugely disproportionate and destructive. The ambitious housing, education, urban policy, and antipoverty efforts of the 1960s have been long since abandoned. We are now dealing with head-on attacks on what remains of civil rights policy under a president who rose to power on racial demagoguery.

“ We are now, in key ways, in the worst situation for racial justice in more than a half-century.”

We are now, in key ways, in the worst situation for racial justice in more than a half-century. Almost all the school integration progress of the past half-century has been lost, and the gaps in college access have actually increased. Our president has reinforced racial fears and stereotypes, and we see many state legislatures undermining voting rights, school integration, and college affirmative action. The Trump administration is gutting civil rights agencies and suspending policies intended to protect equality, including those addressing housing and education. The administration has fostered hatred of immigrants and devastated Latino communities and schools with deportation raids.

The cohesion of our society is at risk. Much was accomplished by the civil rights revolution and we have good evidence about policies that would advance equal opportunity. Much more explicit and sustained efforts are needed. Serious work in the 1960s created a powerful agenda for that time. We need a new agenda now for a much more complex society, more segregated and unequal in some critical ways, and a new vision of integration in a century where we will all soon be minorities and have to depend on each other.

Gary Orfield is a Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning and Co-Director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

On the "Tipping Point" in Residential Segregation...

Here is an interesting, relatively recent piece in the New York Times authored by Thomas B. Edsall titled, "Whose Neighborhood Is It?" that a student shared with me this week as a result of a class discussion we had on the "tipping point" in residential segregation. The tipping point is the point at which "whites begin to leave a residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities move in." Based on this article, this is what we found:

The tipping point, Card and his collaborators note, has been slowly but steadily rising, from an 11.9 percent minority share in the period from 1970-80, to 13.5 percent in 1980-90, to 14.5 percent in 1990-2000.

I have known about the tipping point for some time, but didn't know that the tipping point was so low.  Despite some level of optimism expressed in this piece herein, these numbers still speak volumes about race relations in the U.S. and specifically, how race and class combine in pernicious ways to limit educational opportunity, in particular, for our youth.

Based on research by Gary Orfield and Erica  Frankenberg, with Jongyeon Ee and Jo Kuscera, integration of the nation’s public schools has largely been on a downward path.  Its high point was 1988 when:

43.5 percent of black students attended majority white schools. By 2011, the percentage had fallen to 23.2.

As this piece states, affordable housing in middle class communities is an important policy goal.  However, as covered in this piece below, such remedies are not without their challenges.  As is the case with most challenges, we need good minority representation at all levels.  Poor people need to not only vote, but they also need to vote their interests, including the kind of representation that advocates for affordable housing in middle class neighborhoods. In tandem with this, our communities need to continue to advocate for a living wage, quality schools, low-interest debt funds for minority communities to start and expand non-profits.  Opportunities to establish cooperatives and small businesses are also necessary.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Whose Neighborhood Is It?

Thomas B. Edsall SEPT. 9, 2015

Detroit Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

On June 25, 1974, suburban residents of Detroit won their four-year battle to overturn court-ordered busing of black city students across county lines into their schools.

In a key 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Milliken v. Bradley, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that 41 white suburban governments had not committed “significant violations” of the Constitution.

Burger wrote:

No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of public schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process.

The victory in Milliken was based on the assumption that African-Americans would be bused in, not that they would be living next door. What was not anticipated was a black exodus from Detroit as African-Americans capitalized on new housing laws to move away from the decaying city. The white response to this migration? Flight from inner-ring suburbs.

 Southfield, Mich., for example, which had been 0.7 percent black in 1970, by 2010 had become 70.3 percent black, and its schools nearly 95 percent black. Over the same time period, Ecorse, a suburb southwest of Detroit, went from 0.4 percent black to 44.5 percent, and its school system to 72 percent black; Oak Park from 0.6 to 57.4, and its school system to 95 percent black; Harper Woods from 0.3 to 45.6, and its school system to 88 percent black.

“In Milliken, the Supreme Court had in effect told whites that it was safe to flee and that it would protect them,” Myron Orfield, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, writes in a 2015 U.C.L.A. law review article. Since then, however, many of “these communities have faced a wave of migrants from neighborhoods far more troubled than they were in 1972, a wave that will grow as Detroit continues to depopulate.”

These suburban Detroit communities provide a case study in what has come to be called the “tipping point,” the point at which whites begin to leave a residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities move in.

This phenomenon puzzled Thomas Schelling, a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard and a Nobel Laureate, who was struck by the lack of stable integrated communities. In 1971, he began work on a mathematical theory to explain the prevalence of racial segregation in a paper titled “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

Schelling’s famous thesis has been carefully summarized by Junfu Zhang, an economist at Clark University. Zhang writes:

Schelling’s most striking finding is that moderate preferences for same-color neighbors at the individual level can be amplified into complete residential segregation at the macro level. For example, if every agent requires at least half of her neighbors to be of the same color―a preference far from extreme―the final outcome, after a series of moves, is almost always complete segregation.

In other words, residential segregation can emerge even if initial preferences are very slight.

According to Schelling, Zhang writes,

in an all-white neighborhood, some residents may be willing to tolerate a maximum of 5 percent black neighbors; others may tolerate 10 percent, 20 percent, and so on.
The ones with the lowest tolerance level will move out if the proportion of black residents exceeds 5 percent. If only blacks move in to fill the vacancies after the whites move out, then the proportion of blacks in the neighborhood may reach a level high enough to trigger the move-out of the next group of whites who are only slightly more tolerant than the early movers. This process may continue and eventually result in an all-black neighborhood.
Similarly, an all-black neighborhood may be tipped into an all-white neighborhood, and a mixed-race neighborhood can be tipped into a highly segregated one, depending on the tolerance.

In the years since 1971, scholars have followed up on the Schelling argument with empirical studies.

David Card, a Berkeley economist, working with Alexandre Mas and Jesse Rothstein, both Princeton economists, studied neighborhood change from 1970 to 2000, and found:

Most major metropolitan areas are characterized by a city-specific ‘tipping point,’ a level of the minority share in a neighborhood that once exceeded sets off a rapid exodus of the white population.

The tipping point, Card and his collaborators note, has been slowly but steadily rising, from an 11.9 percent minority share in the period from 1970-80, to 13.5 percent in 1980-90, to 14.5 percent in 1990-2000.

A tipping point in the 13 to 15 percent range means that “a neighborhood can remain stable with a moderate minority share,” according to Card. He and his coauthors conclude “that tipping points are semi-stable, and that neighborhoods can retain an integrated character so long as they remain below the tipping point.”

Neither Schelling nor Card addresses the specific question of integrating poor African-Americans into middle class, majority white neighborhoods.

The percentage of people living in neighborhoods of high concentrated poverty — census tracts where the federal poverty rate is 40 percent or more — has been growing steadily over the past two decades. Moving the poorest residents out of such neighborhoods would involve finding homes for nearly 13.8 million people.

“We are witnessing a nationwide return of concentrated poverty that is racial in nature,” writes Paul A. Jargowsky, a fellow at the Century Foundation, in his Aug. 11 essay “Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy.”

There is wide agreement among scholars that these neighborhoods are harmful to the children who live in them, who suffer disproportionately from impaired cognitive abilities, increased behavioral problems and fragile family structures. In August, Margery Austin Turner, a scholar at the Urban Institute, summarized the problem this way:

Young people from high-poverty neighborhoods are less successful in school than their counterparts from more affluent communities; they earn lower grades, are more likely to drop out, and are less likely to go on to college. Neighborhood environments influence teens’ sexual activity and the likelihood that girls will become pregnant as teenagers. And living in disadvantaged neighborhoods significantly increases the risk of disease and mortality among both children and adults.

Who actually lives in very poor neighborhoods? According to the Century Foundation, 25.2 percent of African-Americans, 17.4 of Hispanics and 7.5 percent of whites.

Black children under the age of 6 are the likeliest to live in high-poverty neighborhoods; 28 percent of African-American children of that age live in them.

At the same time, the evidence of the benefits to children of living in better-off (low poverty) neighborhoods is growing, according to the latest findings from the Moving to Opportunity experimental project.

These benefits — in improved school performance for poor black children, higher college attendance rates, increased marriage rates and greater future annual income — have put liberal advocates of integration on a political collision course with white communities with their own anxieties about tipping points.

In the case of white suburban Detroit, Orfield, of the University of Minnesota, points out that just

as racial integration was temporary in Detroit neighborhoods, so it appears to be in its suburbs. Half of the suburbs that were racially diverse in 2000 had become predominantly nonwhite in 2010, and most of the integrated suburbs in 2010 were in the process of resegregation.

In other words, in the case of the Detroit metropolitan area, moving poor children out of high-poverty communities into less poor sections that are themselves on a path to greater poverty is at best a stopgap measure.

“Our highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not inevitable,” Jargowsky of the Century Foundation writes. He argues that there are two major changes “that need to occur,” both “simple to state, but hard to bring about.”

“First, the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban development,” Jargowsky argues, in order to prevent excessive construction that leads to accelerated abandonment of existing housing:

New housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan population growth. Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole.

These two policy initiatives, along with others requiring aggressive intervention, are hard to bring about in the absence of a national consensus. Without concerted action, the more likely prospect is the continued growth of neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty.

The reality is that integration of the nation’s public schools – despite notable if modest successes with elite exam schools — has been on a steady downward path since 1988, the high point. That year, 43.5 percent of black students attended majority white schools. By 2011, the percentage had fallen to 23.2.

 

In the case of residential segregation, Daniel T. Lichter, director of the Cornell Population Center, writing in the American Sociological Review with Domenico Parisi and Michael C. Taquino, sociologists at Mississippi State University, provides evidence that segregation is growing “between places: city-to-suburb segregation and suburb to suburb.” Ferguson, Mo., Lichter said in a phone interview, “is illustrative of the new place-based segregation, where some communities are becoming more diverse (black, Asian or Hispanic), in part because whites are moving farther out into white suburbs or moving back to the city.”

William Frey, a Brookings demographer, does not dispute Lichter, but argues that when you look at census data at the neighborhood level – as opposed to data at the level of city and county jurisdictions — there is actually a trend toward lessened segregation:

The average white person today lives in a neighborhood that includes more minorities [27 percent] than was the case in 1980, when such neighborhoods were nearly 90 percent white. Moreover, each of the nation’s major minority groups lives in neighborhoods that are at least one-third white.

There may be a trend, then, toward a growing number of stable, middle class integrated communities. But that does not mean that these middle class communities will unambiguously open their doors to the minority poor.

Even residents of Marin County in California, a bastion of Democratic liberalism, have protested proposals to build affordable housing. In May 2014, the California Assembly passed legislation reducing the obligation of Marin County to build low- and moderate-income housing.

If Marin County – as one writer put it a couple of years ago, “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth” — is having a hard time accepting affordable housing, the path out of impoverished neighborhoods for substantial numbers of black children will be arduous.

Residential and public school integration remain an immense challenge. Affordable housing, one piece of the integrative process, got a boost from a favorable Supreme Court decision in June, Texas Department of Housing, that further empowers plaintiffs in housing discrimination cases. A second boost came from new HUD regulations issued in July requiring local governments “to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities.”

Government action has often been resisted but, over time, it has pulled millions of blacks into the mainstream of American life. From 1940 to 2014, the percentage of African-Americans ages 25 to 29 with high school degrees rose from 6.9 percent to 91.9 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of blacks with college degrees grew from 1.4 percent to 22.4 percent. From 1963 (a year before enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to 2015, the percentage of blacks employed in management, professional and related occupations more than tripled, from 8.7 percent to 29.5 percent.

Although progress toward racial and ethnic integration has been sporadic – frequently one step forward, two steps back – credible progress has been made over the last 75 years. We have not come to the end of the story, but there are grounds for optimism.