This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Skip Navigation skip menu and banner
University of Wyoming

  Moran authors book chronicling segregation

The school desegregation journey that began with the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case in 1954 and ended 50 years later with Jenkins vs. Missouri is chronicled in a new book authored by a University of Wyoming College of Education faculty member.

   Race, Law and the Desegregation of Public Schools follows the rocky road between the two cases and the significant changes in schools and American culture that resulted. Peter Moran, assistant professor of elementary and early childhood education, traces the path taken by the Kansas City, Mo., school district as it attempted to comply with the evolving legal standards regarding school desegregation.

   The Kansas City public schools were desegregated one year after the Brown decision, however, as administrators in Kansas City and their peers across the country soon discovered, integrating schools was not as straightforward as it might seem. A number of factors complicated good-faith efforts, like those undertaken by Kansas City, to comply with the implementation decrees that followed Brown. Among those factors: a population shift to the suburbs already in progress in the 1950s and the acceleration in that process that came with court orders to extend integration to more of the schools in a district.

   “There was a lack of consideration for how complicated this would be when talking about a large, urban population,” Moran says, “how big these sections of the city are that are exclusively African-American or exclusively white.”

   Kansas City is notable, in part, because the district didn’t wait for additional court orders to develop an integration plan.  The district’s 1955 integration plan merely dissolved the dual attendance zones that characterized the former segregated system and adopted a single set of attendance zones based on neighborhood schools.  That plan remained in place for the next 25 years despite the fact that it produced little integration.  Due to the extensive residential segregation in the city, most of the district’s schools were located in neighborhoods that were either virtually all white or exclusively African-American.  Integration occurred only in those schools whose attendance zones straddled the prevailing lines of residential segregation.  By the late 1970s, the racially polarized school district was clearly no longer in compliance with the Supreme Court’s decisions on school integration, and the school district initiated an ambitious lawsuit seeking the creation of a metropolitan district absorbing several suburban districts in Missouri and Kansas.  When that lawsuit was dismissed by the federal district court in 1979, a second round of litigation began which resulted in findings that Kansas City and the state of Missouri had failed to integrate many of the city’s schools.  The remedy ordered by the district court in that case, Jenkins v. Missouri, established magnet schools across the system and opened enrollment to students across the metropolitan area. Students could volunteer to attend schools focusing on interest areas such as fine arts, science and engineering, health sciences and college prep. The magnet schools were intended to strengthen academic programs and promote integration by attracting students from neighboring districts.

   The federal district court also ordered a massive program of new construction and extensive remodeling of run-down schools, recognizing the importance of spaces that facilitate learning.  Finally, the court ordered a sweeping array of educational improvements designed to raise student achievement in the Kansas City schools.  Between 1985 and 1995, more than $2 billion were spent on desegregation in Kansas City.

   In the end, the United States Supreme Court’s 1995 ruling in  Jenkins effectively ended the district’s magnet school program – and desegregation overall.  Within two years of the Jenkins decision, more than 200 school districts across the country had returned to federal courts seeking to be relieved of their desegregation orders.

   “The 1995 Jenkins vs. Missouri decision is generally recognized by constitutional and educational historians as being the end of desegregation,” Moran says. “That was the Supreme Court essentially sending the message to all other school districts that ‘we’ve tried it for 40 years and now we’re done with it.’”

   The Court found that Kansas City’s effort overreached the scope of constitutional violations found by the district court ten years earlier. The massive, court-ordered infusions of additional funding from the state of Missouri ended, and all but a handful of the magnet schools reverted back to traditional programming.

   While many consider the desegregation experiment to be a failure, Moran finds signs of growth from lessons learned.

   “The Brown decision set in motion a real change in attitude about race in this country, all for the good,” he says. “It used to be that, if you were an African-American living in the 17 states that either required segregation by law or permitted segregation in schools, you were likely to get an inferior education in many respects. Schools weren’t funded equally, they lacked the same sorts of equipment, resources and facilities that white schools had.”

   Another important lesson learned: the need to focus on strengthening and supporting urban districts.

 “We are now much more aware of what needs to be done in cities,” he says. “That’s the biggest challenge that remains: how do you ensure that a student who attends a dilapidated urban school gets an education even remotely comparable to a student who attends a nice, state-of-the-art school in the suburbs?”

  “One of the things we surely learned through these 40 years of desegregation is that the cities are the place where we need to concentrate our efforts. The cities are where we need to invest in education, much more so than in more affluent communities. What makes Kansas City unique is that they actually tried, for a 10-year period, to do just that.”

   Research conducted for Moran’s dissertation  (2000, American History,Kansas State University) formed the basis for his book and a series of refereed journal articles published in 2004 and 2005. He also was a featured panelist at a “Brown +50” symposium sponsored by Teachers College in New York City.

   Moran had extensive access to public documents related to the cases and individuals involved in both adjudicating them and in implementing the programs designed to integrate schools.