How schools in DC were part of a legacy of segregation

This article is part of a limited series exploring the history, current policies, and intersections between school boundaries and feeder patterns in DC’s public schools and land use, housing, and transportation issues. Read Part II, Part III, and Part IV. And then learn more by tuning into the series’ companion webinar, moderated by journalist Abigail Higgins.

The 2022 school year recently wrapped up in DC — but the school district’s work is far from over. DC Public Schools (DCPS), which serves about 54,000 children, is almost due for its first review of school boundaries and feeder patterns. This review, due in 2024, will be the first comprehensive review since 2014; before that, it had not changed since 1968. The need for this type of oversight was highlighted by at-large Councilmember Christina Henderson who introduced the Attendance Zone Boundaries Amendment Act of 2022 in January.

This review process will be no easy task, especially considering that these lines, which determine where students go to school based on where they live, are one of the country’s biggest barriers to equitable education A 2019 Urban Institute report finds that these lines create unequal schools not only based on race and ethnicity, but on staffing, discipline, and test scores, among other indicators of student success. Moreover, in cities across America, including DC, these boundaries hew closely to redlining maps — the racist, New Deal-era federal policy that determined who was and wasn’t worthy of home loans based on race.

Educational inequity in the District is built on decades of formally, and informally, mandated segregation. Here’s a look at that history, which helps pave the way for future stories about the complicated and closely-knit relationship between housing, land use, and education.

A legacy of fighting segregation in DC’s schools

In the winter of 1947, Black parents in Washington, DC went on strike. They pulled their children out of class and took to the streets, with picket signs reading: “No Second Class Schools For First Class Pupils” and “Equal Facilities for All Children.”

At their helm was Gardner Bishop, often known as “the barber of U Street,” whose daughter Judine went to Browne Junior High, a working-class Black public school that was at double its capacity.

“We were on the bottom shelf. I’m black and I’m poor, so I’m segregated twice,” he said once in a Washington Post interview, articulating his frustration with both the White families and the middle-class Black families who blocked his efforts to transfer Judine to better schools.

Throughout the 1800s, many DC neighborhoods were racially integrated. That ended, however, when rowhouse construction swelled across the city, paired with racial covenants that mostly banned Black people.

As was the case nationwide, housing and demographic patterns were shaped by redlining, a New Deal-era government program that rated neighborhoods based on their “mortgage security.” This explicitly racist policy, based on a handshake between developers and the government, among its other impacts, gave White families loans to buy houses in White neighborhoods — as long as families of color were shut out, as historian Richard Rothstein outlines in his book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America”.

At the same time, the Great Migration was sending millions of Black people north, many to DC, as they fled the racial terror of the south. By 1947, DC’s Black student population had increased by almost 30% and the White population had decreased by 14%. In many overcrowded Black schools, students were attending class in hallways, basements, or outdoors.

At Judine’s school, administrators decided to send students to school in four-hour shifts each day — sometimes in classrooms packed with as many as 58 students. Meanwhile, a neighboring White school, Eliot Junior High, was so under-enrolled that entire classrooms sat empty.

The parents’ strike in protest of these circumstances only ended when NAACP attorney Charles Hamilton Houston filed a lawsuit on their behalf saying that the Board of Education was “willfully refusing to equalize education and knowingly perpetuating inequality.” What was happening at Browne, he added, “would not happen to white children.”

As historians Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove write in “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital,” the strike marked a new era for school segregation in DC — Black parents were organized and they were unafraid to assert the power that came with it. Their efforts culminated in Bolling v. Sharpe, a lawsuit on behalf of 11-year-old Spottswood Bolling, one of five cases that made up Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

“We submit that in this case, in the heart of the nation’s capital, in the capital of democracy, in the capital of the free world, there is no place for a segregated school system,” said James Nabrit Jr., the attorney on the case.

Bolling was important for the District because the Fourteenth Amendment that Brown relied on, the court ruled that day, only applied to states. The court also ruled, however, that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of liberty required school integration — even in the District. When the case was decided in their favor, Bolling’s mother said: “Now we can hold up our heads before the world.”

The integration of Washington, DC, schools wasn’t marked by the same degrees of violence and racial animus seen around the country — such as in Boston where Black kids’ buses were pelted with bricks, or in Texas where White mobs patrolled the streets with guns to stop Black children from registering — but White students did organize walkouts.

Education journalist Douglass Cater called integration in DC “a true model for the nation” at the time, write Asch and Musgrove. However, he added presciently that without serious intervention in housing and urban development, genuine integration would be elusive.

DC’s efforts to integrate were hamstrung by, among other things, its lack of statehood. As the seat of the national government, it was run by Southern segregationists set on enacting a backlash against integration. (For awhile, the Senate subcommittee that dealt with the DC budget was run by former KKK member Senator Robert Byrd).

A new kind of segregation

Their efforts failed to walk Bolling back, but they did help pave the way for a more subtle but still effective form of segregation: White parents pulling their kids out of neighborhood public schools, either by sending them to private school, moving to the suburbs, or sending them to better-resourced public schools in other parts of the city. Outright racism or electoral cowardice meant the government did little to reallocate funding, preferring to hew technically to the laws of school desegregation while putting the burden of integration on individual families and children. Through explicitly racial applications of zoning laws, loan disbursement, and public housing, the government found a variety of other avenues to keep the city segregated.

“Without our government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes —private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression,” writes Rothstein.

This conscious construction of residential segregation, Rothstein writes, is why schools remained (and still remain today) segregated.

Within two years of Bolling, DC’s White public school population had dropped by almost a third, with several schools going from all-White to all-Black in just a handful of years. By 1965, White students comprised less than 10% of public school students but commanded 34% more spending per pupil than Black students.

More formal education policies helped segregate schools too. Asch and Musgrove write about how in the mid-1960s officials implemented a tracking system, allegedly to group students into likeminded categories ranging from “basic” to “honors.” In reality, it grouped students by race and class, eventually spurring a lawsuit (Hobson v. Hansen) that found DC reflected nationwide trends: de jure, or by law, desegregation did not mean de facto, or in practice, desegregation.

Southeast DC transformed on a longer timeline, but only slightly. It was the epicenter of so-called “urban renewal” programs — a federally funded plan in the late 1960s to transform the nation’s cities into professional and commercial playgrounds for commuting White suburbanites. The government razed entire Black neighborhoods, seizing private homes and displacing 23,000 people and 1,800 businesses by the early 1970s.

In further southeast neighborhoods like Congress Heights, which lower-income White people dominated, zoning changes mandated that 75% of residential areas become apartments. Displaced Black people moved in, and more White people moved to the suburbs. By 1970, southeast DC was less than 5% White.

Racial covenants were outlawed in 1948 but by 1960, DC was even more segregated than it had been then.

It’s been over half a century but DC remains residentially and educationally segregated — if not to the same degree, then far too closely. While the groundwork was laid throughout the 1900s, the District’s inequitable housing and school policies continue to reinforce and exacerbate each other. Without serious change, the next 100 years risk looking like the last.

The second article in this series will explore how housing and land use in DC are directly tied to the District’s school boundaries.

This article is part of a limited series made possible with a grant from Education Forward DC. Greater Greater Washington’s editorial department maintains editorial control and independence in accordance with our editorial policy. Our journalists follow the ethics guidelines of the Society of Professional Journalists.