U.S. School Segregation Now at ’69 Level: Study Shows 15-Year Decline; Hispanics Less Integrated Than African Americans

Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A10

Half a century after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American education, schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, according to a report released today by Harvard University researchers.

The study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, shows that progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s as courts concluded that the goals of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had largely been achieved. Over the past 15 years, the trend has been in the opposite direction, and most white students now have “little contact” with minority students in many areas of the country, according to the report.

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