North Carolina School Desegregation & Resegregation Timeline

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On May 18th, 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that racial segregation was constitutional under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

On March 27th, 1951, the McKissick v. Carmichael decision ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, four Black students seeking admission to UNC’s Law School, effectively desegregating the Law School. This ruling gave the precedent for other forms of higher education across the state to desegregate.

Plaintiff Floyd McKissick, the first Black student at UNC Law on why he chose UNC to help desegregate:

In the summer of 1954, Governor Umstead responded to the Brown decision by creating the Governor’s Specialty Advisory Committee on Education, led by Thomas Pearsall, an attorney and politician from Rocky Mount, NC. Umstead claimed that the goal of the committee was to “establish a policy and a program which will preserve the State public school system by having the support of the people.”

After the initial Brown decision in 1954, the Court convened to rule on the implementation of the original ruling. The Court decided that the decision should be implemented with “all deliberate speed.”

On September 4th, 1957, Dorothy Counts becomes the first Black student to attend a predominantly white school in North Carolina, Harry Harding High School in Charlotte. Counts was met with intense resistance and violence from white students, parents, and administrators alike. Dorothy Counts discusses her first day of school:

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In September 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed, killing four Sunday School children. This event, in combination with earlier instances of violence in Birmingham that spring, shocked the nation and made Civil Rights in America an international issue.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is passed in April, 1965 as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. This Act gave the Civil Rights Act the ability to actually withhold federal funding for noncompliant districts.

In April 1968, Civil Rights leader MLK Jr is assassinated. As protests spark across the country, the Nixon campaign seizes on the idea of “law and order”, and public opinion shifts away from favoring increased civil rights for Black Americans.

Richard Nixon is elected as president, campaigning on the “Southern Strategy”, focusing on rhetoric of “law and order” and increasing racial fears of white Republicans. Nixon would go on to appoint four Supreme Court justices that would make key decisions regarding desegregation.

Civil Rights leader and school desegregationist Dr. Dudley Flood began his position at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction on January 2nd, 1970. Dr. Flood, along with his colleague Gene Causby, traveled across the state as representatives of DPI to meet with school districts who were struggling with how to desegregate their local schools. Here, Dr. Flood discusses the responses that communities had to desegregation plans, specifically school closures:

Listen to Part I and Part II of the full interview, or read the full interview transcript.

[learn_more caption=”Audio Transcript”] “There was no one way that you would characterize their behavior, but there were several things that you could anticipate. The first is that you’re asking people to make a change, and it’s very rare that you meet anybody who wants to make a change. So you had to devise a matter of analyzing change for them. And there are three elements of that that you have to analyze. First of all, how pleased are you with what you now have? Secondly, what is the specific change you’ve been asked to make and thirdly what will be different and better? When you shall have made that change, unless those three things are in place, you continue to have this kind of annuity between what the law says or the policy says and what people are actually going to do. If, for example, your plan called for closing the school, which it often did, you closing the black school or move all the kids to the previously white school. They are grandmothers and mothers sometimes who aren’t in that school. It was the definition they had for what school is and then many communities, particularly in many black communities, the school’s the center of the community. It was the one thing around which everyone coalesced. It was the social life, it was the educational life and everything else that was meaningful to them. So the identity with that school was way beyond just education, way beyond that.”[/learn_more]

In July 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Miliken that schools were not responsible for busing students to other schools across district lines. This set a long precedent that schools could not desegregate across district lines–a larger issues for de facto segregated districts in the North that could have dozens of districts within a single county.

In May 1994, five districts in low-wealth counties filed a lawsuit against the state, arguing that despite the fact that they were being taxed at higher-than-average rates, their school districts did not have enough funds to provide an equal education for their students. 25 years later, the Leandro case continues to be one of the biggest issues within North Carolina education policy. Learn more about the Leandro case here.

In 1997, the North Carolina Supreme Court declared that North Carolina was obligated to provide its students a “sound, basic education.”

In 1997, William Capacchione, a white parent, filed a lawsuit against CMS on behalf of his daughter Christina stating that she was not admitted to a magnet school of her choice due to her race. In 1999, the judge ruled that CMS must stop using race as a category for pupil assignments to schools within the district. The judge also ruled that Charlotte has been compliant with the Swann ruling and “has achieved unitary status in all respects,” and no longer needs to be under court-ordered desegregation.

This second Leandro ruling affirmed the “Leandro Tenets” necessary to receiving a sound, basic education. It also ruled that the state was in violation of providing a sound, basic education, and that it was not possible to achieve this by transferring educational responsibility to localities.

In February 2011, Senate Bill 8 was passed, lifting the 100 charter school cap put in place by the previous 1996 Charter School Act. The cap was lifted in order to receive federal funding from the Race to the Top program. This led to a rapid increase in charter schools across the state, which have demonstrated in recent years to be increasingly more segregated than traditional public schools, and in North Carolina, serve primarily white students. In these districts, charter schools effectively segregate traditional public schools.

In November 2017, NC Governor Cooper issued Executive Order 27, which created the Commission on Access to Sound Basic Education. The mission of the Commission is to assess the state’s ability to staff schools with highly effective teachers and principals, and the state’s commitment to providing adequate resources for all students.

In December 2019, WestEd released its report to the public. The report titled Sound Basic Education for All: An Action Plan for North Carolina, included 8 detailed recommendations of how North Carolina could comply with the Leandro orders.