In the northeastern cities, in New England, in the Midwest, and in Virginia, blacks and whites killed at similar rates throughout the first half of the 19th century. Then a gap opened up, and it widened even further in the 20th century, when homicides among African Americans skyrocketed, going from three times the white rate in New York in the 1850s to almost thirteen times the white rate a century later.43
As the small populations of blacks in Northern cities became more acculturated to the norms of the larger society during the nineteenth century, racial barriers began to erode. In Illinois, for example, legal restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks were removed from the law.44 There were not enough black voters at that time to have brought this about by themselves, so this represented changes in white public opinion.
In nineteenth-century Detroit, blacks had been denied the right to vote in 1850, but they were voting in the 1880s, and in the 1890s blacks were being elected to statewide offices in Michigan by a predominantly white electorate. The 1880 census showed that, in Detroit, it was not uncommon for blacks and whites to live next door to each other.45 The black upper class had regular social interactions with upper-class whites, and their children attended high schools and colleges with the children of their white counterparts.46
Writing in 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois noted “a growing liberal spirit toward the Negro in Philadelphia,” in which the larger community had begun to “brush away petty hindrances and to soften the harshness of race prejudice”—leading, among other things, to blacks being able to live in white neighborhoods.47 Both contemporary and later writers commented on similar developments in other Northern communities.48
While black children in most Northern communities had long been educated in racially segregated schools during the first half of the nineteenth century, if they were allowed to attend public schools at all, this changed during the second half of that century:
By 1870, those northern states that had excluded blacks from public schools had reversed course. Moreover, during the quarter century following the end of the Civil War, most northern states enacted legislation that prohibited racial segregation in public education. Most northern courts, when called upon to enforce this newly enacted antisegregation legislation, did so, ordering the admission of black children into white schools.49
These were not just coincidental mood swings among whites across the North. The behavior of blacks themselves had changed. As Jacob Riis put it in 1890, “There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.”50 By the late nineteenth century, most blacks in New York state had been born in New York state, and grew up with values and behavior patterns similar to those of the vastly larger white population around them.
However, in this as in other things, a major retrogression set in later, in Northern cities, with the arrival of large masses of black migrants from the South in the early twentieth century, concentrated within a relatively few years and arriving in numbers sufficient to prevent their becoming as acculturated to the norms of the larger society, either as quickly or as much as the small nineteenth-century black populations had in the North. The same retrogressions in race relations seen in other aspects of life likewise occurred in Northern schools:
… with the migration of hundreds of thousands of southern blacks into northern communities during the first half of the twentieth century, northern school segregation dramatically increased. Indeed, by 1940, northern school segregation was more extensive than it had been at any time since Reconstruction.51
In most cases, this was de facto racial segregation in the North, as distinguished from the explicit racial segregation by law in Southern schools. But similar end results were achieved in the North by gerrymandering school districts and by other means. Among the reasons cited for this resurgence of racial segregation in the Northern schools were both educational and behavioral problems of black children.52 However, as regards educational problems, surveys in both Chicago and Detroit indicated that these were primarily problems with black children whose families had migrated from the South,53 where educational standards were lower.
Neither eras of progress in race relations nor eras of retrogression were simply inexplicable mood swings among whites. Both represented responses to demonstrable changes in local black populations. These responses were complicated by the inherent problems of white third parties trying to sort out differences among black children, even though sorting out black children in general from white children in general required nothing more than eyesight.
Moreover, in the early twentieth century, the rise to dominance of genetic determinism as a supposedly “scientific” doctrine strengthened the hand of those white officials who were prepared to write off the potential of black and other minority children, as the Progressives of that era did.
UNSORTING PEOPLE
The residential and other outcomes produced by the sorting of people became, in the second half of the twentieth century, widely condemned as wrong in itself, and as creating other social wrongs against the less fortunate groups. This might be considered a special case of the more general assumption that outcomes would tend to be even, or random, in the absence of malign intervention.
But, whatever it was based on, the view became axiomatic among many Americans in the second half of the twentieth century that unsorting people was a high priority, especially in schools, but also in residential neighborhoods.
Educational Unsorting
Perhaps the most famous, and most consequential, Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century was that in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, declaring that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. This ended more than half a century of hypocrisy, following the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that government-imposed racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment requirement of “equal protection of the laws” for all, so long as the racially segregated facilities provided for blacks were “separate but equal.”
For generations, it was widely known that the separate facilities provided for blacks in the racially segregated South were grossly unequal. As courts belatedly began to demand that either equal state institutions be provided for blacks or else blacks must be admitted to the institutions provided for whites, various efforts were made by Southern states to reduce the inequality and, in some cases, blacks were reluctantly granted access to some white institutions, such as a law school in Texas, though with restrictions that did not apply to white students.54 But even this represented a slow, uphill advance against determined resistance by Southern officials.
Now, in the Brown v. Board of Education case, a unanimous Supreme Court decreed that racially segregated schools were, in Chief Justice Warren’s words, inherently unequal,55 so that the slow and circuitous route to equalizing government facilities was to be replaced by simply outlawing the official sorting of school children by race.
It was now no longer a question of unequal physical facilities or unequal financial support, for the very act of racial segregation was said to reduce the educational prospects of black children: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”56
In the heady atmosphere of the times, where the Brown v. Board of Education decision was widely hailed by blacks and most whites alike, except among white Southerners, as a long overdue end to government-imposed racial segregation and discrimination, the ringing assertions made by Chief Justice Warren were widely accepted. Nevertheless, only about a mile from where those pronouncements were made in the Supreme Court, there was an all-black public high school whose history, going all the way back into the nineteenth century, belied the Chief Justice’s key assertions about empirical facts.
As of 1954, when Chief Justice Warren declared that separa
te schools were inherently unequal, all-black Dunbar High School sent a higher percentage of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in Washington.57 As far back as 1899, when the same tests were given in Washington’s four academic high schools at that time, this same all-black public high school scored higher than two of the three white public high schools.58
Although most of its graduates went to local colleges, some were already beginning to go to some of the leading colleges in the country at the end of the nineteenth century—and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Over the period from 1892 to 1954, 34 of these graduates were admitted to Amherst College. Of these, 74 percent graduated from Amherst, and 28 percent of these black graduates were Phi Beta Kappas.59 Among other elite colleges from which students from this high school graduated Phi Beta Kappa during that era were Harvard, Yale, Williams, Cornell, and Dartmouth.60
Among the graduates of this high school—known by various names over the years since its founding in 1870, including Dunbar High School since 1916—were “the first black who” had a range of career achievements. These included the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. at an American university, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black tenured professor at a major national university, and Dr. Charles Drew, who won international recognition as a pioneer in the use of blood plasma.61
Clearly, racially segregated schools were not inherently inferior. There is no question that most black schools in the South at that time, and many in the North, had inferior educational outcomes. And no doubt inferior resources supplied to black schools had a role in these outcomes, though not necessarily the sole role or the most important role.
In any event, the crusade to racially integrate public schools, during the decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, generated much social turmoil, racial polarization and bitter backlashes, but no general educational improvement from seating black school children next to white school children.
One of the painful ironies of the racial integration crusade was that Dunbar High School’s 85 years of academic achievement came to an abrupt end, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. To comply with that decision, Washington schools were all made neighborhood schools, so that Dunbar could no longer admit black students from anywhere in the city, as it had before, but only students from the particular ghetto neighborhood where it was located. Dunbar quickly became a typical failing ghetto school, with both academic and behavioral problems.
By 1993, a smaller percentage of Dunbar students went on to college than had done so 60 years earlier62—even though 1933 was in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and 1993 was in the midst of the prosperous decade of the 1990s.
Neither racial integration nor general prosperity, nor even a newer, more modern and more costly school building was a substitute for what was lost. Yet, toward the end of the twentieth century, some new and highly successful schools brought educational excellence back to many ghetto communities, not only in Washington but also in New York and other communities across the country. Many of these educational successes were in particular chains of charter schools, such as the Success Academy and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) chains.
Not all charter schools were successful, but those that were successful often produced a level of educational achievement far above those of either most ghetto schools or many of the white schools to which black children were bused in the name of racial integration.
Because these highly successful charter schools were often located in low-income black or Hispanic neighborhoods, the demographic makeup of their students was seldom what racial integrationists were seeking. But, nevertheless, educational tests showed that the academic level of students in some of the more successful charter schools located in black ghettos scored well above the national average.
In 2013, children in the fifth grade in one of the Harlem schools in the Success Academy chain “surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs,” according to the New York Times. Nor was this an isolated fluke. In 2014, children in the Success Academy chain of charter schools as a whole scored in the top 3 percent in English and in the top 1 percent in math.63
Although successful charter schools have often been located in low-income minority neighborhoods—and often in the very same buildings where the regular public school children score far below the national average—the successful charter schools are not destroyed by their location, as Dunbar High School had been, when it became a neighborhood school.
Unlike other public schools, charter schools are neither required nor authorized to enroll all the students in their respective neighborhoods. Students are admitted to many or most charter schools by lottery, while most of the local students end up in the regular public school in their neighborhood.
Although admission to these charter schools is by chance, rather than by ability or performance, there is nevertheless a self-sorting of parents and students, with only those parents who want a better education for their children, and only those children willing to subject themselves to a more demanding regimen of school work, being likely to seek admission.
Here, as with Dunbar High School during its past era of academic achievement, self-sorting was crucial. Black students were not simply assigned to go to Dunbar High School. They had to apply, and those with neither the interest nor the inclination to subject themselves to rigorous educational norms had no reason to apply.
The educational track record of such self-sorting has been far more successful than third-party sorting, whether the third parties sorted by race or by residential location, or by a belief that racial diversity would lead to higher educational achievements.
The self-sorting found among other groups in countries around the world is denied to American blacks when their children are all lumped together, whether by race in the days of the racially segregated South or by residence in public schools with monopolies in their respective districts.
Internal differences have been at least as common among blacks as among other racial or ethnic groups, making self-sorting a way of reducing counterproductive frictions that impede education. Successful charter schools give a glimpse of what can be accomplished by black children in low-income ghettos when self-sorting frees them from the disruptions and violence of unruly classmates, just a small number of whom can prevent a whole class from getting a decent education.
Residential Unsorting
Along with the unsorting of American school children by decades of mandatory busing to racially “integrate” public schools in racially different neighborhoods, there have been parallel efforts to racially “integrate” the neighborhoods themselves.
Among the various government programs to unsort people who have sorted themselves have been programs to build the kind of housing in middle-class neighborhoods that would be affordable to people with lower incomes. Other strategies have included providing subsidies to enable low-income and minority families to be able to rent existing housing in higher income neighborhoods.
The assumption behind such programs has been that social isolation was behind many social pathologies in the ghettos, so that ending that isolation would lead to improvements in the behavior and performances of minority adults and children.
This was essentially the same assumption behind the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, that separate facilities were inherently unequal. Although that decision did not explicitly state that racial mixing was essential for black children to get an equal education, that was the logical corollary of what the decision did say.
The idea of racial “integration” or demographic “diversity” spread from education issues to questions of residential unsorting of different racial, ethnic or income groups. Government promotion or imposition of such policies was said to benefit both the newcomers inserted into middle-class neighborhoods and the existing residen
ts who had sorted themselves away from them.
Whatever the plausibility of these assumptions and theories, the crucial question of the empirical validity of these assumptions depends on hard evidence. Contrary to those who attribute social pathologies in the ghettos to external causes in general, and white racism in particular, some of the strongest opposition to government programs that insert people from ghettos into middle-class neighborhoods came from black residents in those middle-class neighborhoods.64 As the Chicago Tribune put it:
The harshest criticism of dispersing public housing’s tenants comes not from whites but from blacks. In Harvey, a struggling, working-class African-American suburb south of the city, nearly one of every 10 housing units is already occupied by renters with subsidies.65
Among the behaviors of the newcomers commonly complained of by the original residents of working-class and middle-class neighborhoods around the country are that the newcomers’ teen-aged children “are allowed to hang out on corners, play basketball late into the night, and sit in parked cars blasting profane music,”66 as in Chicago. According to pre-existing residents, “they hear frequent gunfire.”67
In a San Francisco Bay Area community, the charge is that the children of the newcomers are “burglarizing nearby residences, hosting wild parties during the week and weekends, threatening neighbors, and engaging in various forms of criminal activity… robbing and assaulting our kids to and from school.”68 In Louisville, homicides have remained concentrated over the years in areas where housing project people have been concentrated.69
Black residents in working-class or middle-class communities have been particularly uninhibited in their denunciations of people from housing projects and people on welfare that the government inserts into their communities, perhaps because black middle-class residents are not afraid of being called “racists.”
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