... Organization and racial composition of the schools; effect of discrimination in public housing; consideration of the policy of the Boston School Committee; comparison of student performance and teacher qualifications in predominately white, non-white and integrated schools and an examination of compensatory programs ...

A report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo examines how the citizens and the political leadership of the two cities dealt with controversial court orders to end the segregation of public schools. Although the cities shared many similarities, they witnessed very dissimilar outcomes. Taylor covers key factors such as inter-ethnic relations and the struggle of various ethnic groups for political empowerment, and focuses on the political development of African American communities in urban environments and the role of Black elected leadership in helping to diffuse potentially volatile situations.

The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment. Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.