Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, is school segregation here to stay? | Opinion

At the start of the 2008-09 school year, I drove past the University of Florida’s red-brick campus to the city’s economically disadvantaged eastside to film a documentary about the community’s elementary school, which had overcome numerous odds to become one of the Sunshine State’s brightest spots.

Half a decade earlier, Gainesville’s Duval Elementary catapulted from an F to an A on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). It maintained its academic excellence through the 2007-08 school year.

As I entered Duval, however, I felt as if I’d traveled back in time to the early 1950s. Although the administration and faculty were diverse, the student population was 99% Black. So much for the widely held notion, I thought, that the U.S. Supreme Court ended school segregation in 1954.

Seventy years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the court declared race-based school segregation unconstitutional. By the 1970s, the court’s historic decision integrated much of Florida, including Duval’s district, Alachua, as well as Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to a 2017 UCLA report.

Had I visited Duval in the mid-1990s, according to then-Principal Leanetta McNealy, I would’ve seen just as many white and international students — most of them the children of UF faculty and graduate students — as Black students.

At the time, Duval served as the district’s ESOL (English Speakers of Other Languages) center.

Soon, however, the ground shifted.

“The parents felt the need to have their children closer to the University of Florida,” McNealy says in the documentary, “Class of Her Own,” which started streaming in April on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other platforms.

The parents prevailed. Duval lost its ESOL center designation — and with it, the vast majority of its white and international students — to an elementary school near the university, J.J. Finely.

In the process, Duval involuntarily joined a statewide and national resegregation trend propelled to a large degree by 1990s court rulings that weakened Brown v. Board of Education’s enforcement.

“In some important cases,” the UCLA report states, “the federal judges actually took the very unusual step of taking the initiative to begin the resegregation process even when the district did not want it.”

One such district was Broward, according to the report.

A reversal of this trend has yet to appear on the horizon. According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, “schools remain divided along racial, ethnic, and economic lines throughout the U.S.”

Even now, 70 years to the day since the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954 decision in Brown, segregation runs rampant in rural, urban and suburban schools. A 2024 New America Education Funding Equity Initiative study homed in on housing segregation as one of its impetuses.

“Segregated neighborhoods produce unfairly funded school districts,” the study says, “unequal schools then serve to perpetuate and worsen neighborhood segregation.” A 2019 EdBuild study calculated the “gap between white and nonwhite school districts” at a dumbfounding $23 billion.

Arguments for desegregating schools make as much sense now as they did 70 years ago. Decades of data illustrate that integration narrows the achievement gaps between white and Black students, improves white and Black children’s academic performance and experience, and makes it possible for them to navigate our swiftly diversifying society and global economy.

Yet some Black leaders have long questioned integration’s perceived absolute value. For instance, in a 1955 opinion piece for the Orlando Sentinel about Brown v. Board of Education, the Harlem Renaissance’s Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “I regard the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race.”

Others have sought to make lemonade out of segregation’s lemons, so to speak, by supporting community schools such as East Gainesville’s Duval Elementary.

Yet Duval struggled after it lost its star teacher, Gloria Jean Merriex, in 2008. The next year, the school lost its A-status. It closed in 2015.

The city turned the building into Duval Early Learning Academy.

The academy soon shut down.

Some eastside community members have called to reopen the school. They’ve failed to garner enough support. Recently, a compromise surfaced in the form of a proposal to reestablish Duval as a cultural youth center.

When I first visited Duval in 2008, I felt shocked to discover that school segregation persisted into the 21st century. Today, I wonder how I’d feel if I visited the deserted building and what goes through the minds and hearts of eastside community members when they pass it by.

Boaz Dvir is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, an associate professor of journalism at Penn State in State College, Penn., and director of the university’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative. He previously taught at the University of Florida in Gainesville.