The “Desegregation” of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools in Context

This piece sets out to evaluate the actions of the Washington, D.C. school authorities in response to the Bolling decision of May 1954. It assesses the steps taken towards desegregation and the motivations behind them, placing these into context by first reviewing the previous actions of both the Superintendent, the Board of Education, and their predecessors in the years building up to this decision under the legally imposed racially-segregated system. This is primarily achieved through the forensic cross-examination of contributions made by these actors in meetings, reports, and public statements across several years in the build-up to ‘desegregation’.

Ultimately, several conclusions are drawn. Firstly, that authorities in Washington, D.C. behaved in a similar way to those in northern metropolises by not openly defying the Court order, but equally doing the bare minimum to comply and taking no measures to actively integrate its school system. Secondly, that the Superintendent of Schools and various white-majorities of the Board consistently and deliberately acted to place the comfort and superiority of white students above the educational needs of black students both before and after ‘desegregation’, and that these ideas were rooted in the same ideas of white supremacy’s ‘naturalness’ as in the northern metropolises experiencing similar demographic shifts. Finally, that at least partly due to a lack of active integratory measures taken by the authorities, the Washington D.C. public schools were never integrated to any meaningful extent.