After all, Samuels notes, other ethnic groups that came to America developed their own sustaining networks of clubs, unions, and neighborhood schools in which individuals could find a footing before diving into the American "melting pot." Slavery had long denied black Americans such institutions; liberal integrationists, however unintentionally, undercut them just as they were emerging. And today, Samuels says, with the future of funding for public black universities uncertain, it still appears that too few people recognize that "separation and integration are not ultimately mutually exclusive."
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Awareness. White resistance and backlash were not wholly unanticipated. Yet the determined, even violent, opposition to integration had the most ironic of unintended consequences--or so argues University of Virginia legal scholar Michael Klarman in his book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. The spectacle of violent confrontation transformed many Americans' views about race. And a new heightened awareness of racial injustice, Klarman believes, is what ultimately drove the adoption of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
But did Brown and subsequent desegregation decisions drive white flight, hasten urban decline, turn working whites against liberalism, and give rise to new forms of school segregation? The answers are anything but simple. Brown and busing did become important symbols in the debate over the causes of urban decline. Yet the underlying causes of that decline date from before 1954, as Thomas Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania historian, demonstrates in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Seismic shifts were underway in the 1940s, as blacks came north for factory jobs, and black neighborhoods began to swell and press upon the borders of traditionally white neighborhoods. Losing confidence in the ability of urban, and mainly Democratic, political machines to "protect" them--and already bothered by the presence of blacks in the workplace--whites began their flight to the suburbs. Doing so, they were aided by federal loan programs that, Sugrue says, "effectively mandated racial separation by saying mixed neighborhoods were actuarial risks." As urban factories began to downsize, the white exodus accelerated.
"It's important to note," Sugrue says, "that the rate of flight is the same out of cities that didn't have busing or court-imposed desegregation plans"--for example, Philadelphia--"as those that did." Indisputable, too, is the result of white flight: In 1998, of the 83 districts in and around Detroit, 80 percent of blacks attended schools in only three of them.
All the same, working-class whites, in cities and elsewhere, were right in thinking that American elites--particularly those in the Democratic Party--had fingered them to bear the brunt of desegregation. Little wonder blue-collar whites grew disillusioned with liberalism, says Kenneth Durr, author of Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore. As he explains, Brown, civil rights legislation, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (including affirmative action) convinced many working-class people that the Democratic Party they associated with the New Deal--a broad coalition based largely on shared economic interests--was letting them down. Americans' unwillingness to talk about class meant, Durr argues, "that race got laid on top of class" in a way that left the economic plight of most blacks, much less that of many whites, unaddressed. "By deciding to address inequality interest group by interest group, we spawned identity politics," he says. And that, in turn, "led to the fragmentation of American society along identity lines."
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