When the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the court hoped K-12 schools across the nation would give equal opportunities to both Black and white students.
Many believed that tying the fate of Black students to the fate of their white peers would lift Black students because of white parents’ and legislators’ resources and political leverage to provide for their own children.
But today, nearly 70 years after the landmark ruling, students in Virginia remain largely separated by race and economic class. While segregation is no longer mandated by public policy, it is reinforced by school attendance zones and segregated housing patterns.
The all-white schools of the past have all but vanished and have been replaced by schools with almost exclusively students of color, according to an analysis by the Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism team in conjunction with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In the 2022-23 school year, more than 30,000 students in Richmond and Chesterfield and Henrico counties attended “intensely” segregated schools — in which either white students or students of color made up 90% or more of the student body.
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In its landmark decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court said: “segregated public schools are not ‘equal’ and cannot be made ‘equal …’ ”
In segregated schools in the Richmond area today, teacher vacancy levels are higher and teachers are more likely to be inexperienced, according to the newspaper’s analysis. This mirrors state and national trends.
Fairfield Court
Fairfield Court Elementary School in Richmond’s East End is 89% Black and less than 1% white. Its student body is 97% economically disadvantaged, a rough gauge of poverty measured by the state.
Many of its students have never crossed the James River, just a few miles away, and have never been on the South Side of Richmond, said Principal Angela Wright.
“Their education is not really what they’re fighting for right now,” Wright said. “They’re fighting for their basic food, clothing and shelter.”
On the school’s playground, swings are cracked in half, left hanging in disrepair.
During Richmond Public Schools’ spring break in early April and in the following week, eight people were killed in the city’s East End, and four of those victims were minors.
“It’s been a terrible two weeks in our city,” Police Chief Rick Edwards said at the time. “Kids have seen their parents killed. Parents have seen their kids killed.”
Fairfield Court parents know that when their children get to school, they’re safe and they’re going to learn, Wright said.
“But sometimes it’s just that walk to school that we’re worried about.”
Wright said teachers work to build solid relationships and trust with students, so they feel safe and can focus on learning.
“We have to make sure when they’re sitting there, they’re not thinking about, ‘what’s gonna happen when I go home? Is it gonna be safe for me walking home?’ Because sometimes they may not be thinking about whatever that core instruction is,” Wright said.
Mary Munford
Across town at Mary Munford Elementary School in Richmond’s West End, the student population is 78% white and 8% Black, and 13% of the students are deemed economically disadvantaged.
Kids from around the city flock to the school’s 9-acre playground after school and on weekends to play on the modern jungle gym, tennis courts, soccer fields, basketball courts and gaga ball pit — a new variant of dodgeball played in a small octagon.
Principal Greg Muzik, who has been at Mary Munford for 31 years, said that when his students don’t show up to school for 10 days, it’s because they traveled to Europe for a family vacation. It’s not because they don’t have a winter coat, clean clothes or a parent to walk them there — all problems that some students at Fairfield Court face.
“We have children that are attending the school, who live in our neighborhood that are African American, but I will tell you that most of them are not low-income African American families. There’s no low-income housing in this area,” Muzik said.
Fairfield Court and Mary Munford elementary schools, though both in the same school district, are night and day.
The residential segregation in Richmond today, which in turn affects school demographics, is a vestige of redlining, the federal government’s discriminatory practice in the 1930s and 1940s that denied services to certain neighborhoods largely based on race. In neighborhoods that government surveyors marked on maps in red, it was hard or impossible for families to get housing loans and build equity.
Mary Munford is in a neighborhood that the government had labeled as an “A,” which indicated a low likelihood of racial change. The federal government labeled the neighborhood from which Fairfield Court Elementary draws its students as a “D,” the lowest grade, which was considered “hazardous” and indicated a high percentage of non-white people lived there.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 barred redlining nationwide, but its legacy continues to shape patterns of economic and social inequality.
“We are very, very far away from becoming a school system where you could walk into any school and see the full diversity of Richmond,” said Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras.
“That’s just not where we are right now. I believe becoming that is really important,” he said.
“We’re fighting against decades, if not centuries, of institutionalized racism, quite frankly.”
Housing
Throughout the 1960s, Richmond integrated its schools a few students at a time, which allowed white residents the entire decade to sell their homes and move to surrounding counties. White enrollment in city schools steadily declined throughout the decade.
Amid “white flight” to the suburbs, the percentage of white students in Richmond’s public schools dropped from 45% in 1960 to 21% in 1975, according to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
That decline occurred even though Richmond’s white leaders, in an effort to remain in power, annexed 23 square miles of Chesterfield County on Jan. 1, 1970, reducing the city’s population of Black residents from 52% to 42%. The city acquired 10 nearly all-white schools.
Lois Harrison-Jones, who became the first Black female superintendent of Richmond Public Schools in 1985, was working in the school system before, during and after desegregation.
She started teaching at Woodville Elementary School in 1954, the fall after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. She watched enrollment in city schools drop steadily throughout the 1960s as families with means relocated to Chesterfield and Henrico counties.
“Suburban schools were perceived as being safer and better,” Harrison-Jones said in an interview. “I don’t think it has a lot to do with verified, factual displeasure. ... It’s amazing how fearful people are of the unknown and how unfounded many of the fears were. But if a person is afraid, you can’t say, ‘don’t be afraid.’ ”
In September 1960, Gloria Jean Mead and Carol Irene Swann became the first Black students admitted to a previously all-white city school at Chandler Junior High.
Many of the first Black students to attend traditionally white schools "felt unwelcome and unwanted and unprotected,” Harrison-Jones said.
The students told Harrison-Jones at the time that while they were not mistreated by personnel, they were not protected from the children who taunted them.
“Many parents were concerned, Black parents and whites, but the Black parents were concerned that the law of the land was really putting their children in imminent danger, and they weren’t putting in the safeguards there,” Harrison-Jones said.
The people who fled Richmond were mostly middle class, so city schools became poorer.
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor and education researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University, said there is no single factor that contributed to white flight out of Richmond.
“There is this story, I think, that gets told that desegregation was the cause of white flight,” Siegel-Hawley said. “It accelerated it, at least temporarily, in places that did not do a (metropolitan-wide desegregation plan). But it wasn’t the only force.”
Local governments “essentially subsidized” white flight to the suburbs through the construction of highways, racial discrimination in the housing markets, and mortgage financing that was more available in the suburbs, Siegel-Hawley said.
There were almost no Black students in majority-white schools before the concerted federal enforcement of school desegregation, which began around 1968. The number of Black students increased markedly until 1980, though some of the judicial retrenchment began a bit earlier.
School integration peaked in the South around 1968, when 43% of Black students attended majority-white schools. Then, it steadily declined to 17% of Black students in majority-white schools by 2020, according to a 2024 report from The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
“You can just see that the influence of the court-ordered desegregation begins to wane. And we have causal evidence suggesting that school districts that are released from court order resegregate,” Siegel-Hawley said.
Virginia’s resistance to integration
Richmond’s school desegregation chronicle became the focal point of legal rulings that influenced public education nationwide.
Although Richmond avoided the violence that some other Southern cities saw in response to desegregation, the city’s resolve to impede and restrict it was just as strong and effective.
In 1956, as U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., D-Va., led “massive resistance” to school desegregation, Virginia formed the Pupil Placement Board, which assigned each student to a school. It was one of Virginia’s legal loopholes to keep schools segregated without outright defying the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The Pupil Placement Board’s three original members said its policy was “to fight, with every legal and honorable means, any attempted mixing of races in public schools.”
In 1958, Gov. Lindsay Almond ordered schools in a number of Virginia jurisdictions closed in defiance of federal courts’ integration orders. Prince Edward County, one of the school districts in the Brown v. Board case, closed its public schools for five years — from 1959 to 1964 — rather than desegregate.
The state’s Pupil Placement Board used attendance boundaries as a way to keep schools segregated. Schools were already placed in the center of either Black or white neighborhoods, not in between. The board’s boundaries reinforced those neighborhood lines, instead of integrating schools.
Students could request a transfer, but the board could and did reject applicants.
A 1970 court ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. led to a short-lived period in which 13,000 Richmond students were bused to schools around the city.
In January 1972, Merhige ordered a merger of the Richmond, Chesterfield and Henrico school systems in an effort to create a consolidated system of 104,000 students, in which a third of the students would be Black. Five months later, a federal appeals court overturned the decision. The appeals court ruling stood as the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on whether to review the case. Justice Lewis Powell, a former Richmond School Board member, recused himself.
Most cross-town busing ended, and students largely went back to attending their neighborhood schools.
Gov. Holton ushers in new era
In 1969, Virginia elected Linwood Holton as its first Republican governor of the 20th century. He took a progressive stance on integration at a time of significant racial tension in the state. Holton enrolled his children, including his daughter Anne, in predominantly Black public schools in Richmond as a gesture to promote integration.
Anne Holton grew up in the Executive Mansion and later returned to it as first lady during the governorship of her husband, Tim Kaine. Holton served as Virginia’s secretary of Education from 2014 to 2016 and now serves on the state Board of Education.
Holton recalls her first day at Mosby School in the fall of 1970. In band class, she remembers looking at the big, mirrored wall and seeing the reflection of herself as the only white face in a sea of Black faces around her.
“For somebody who had never been out of my little white world before that, it was different,” Holton said in an interview. “It was really great learning in the classroom, and great learning beyond the classroom, just getting to know people whose circumstances were different. ... Part of what we learned was our similarities and commonalities across differences.”
Before the first day of school in 1970, 12-year-old Anne’s parents had a family meeting with her and her siblings to talk about how they would be attending predominantly Black schools.
Our parents told us, “We’re getting to be part of something bigger than ourselves and helping make our community move forward on treating people equally and that that was long overdue,” Anne Holton said.
Linwood Holton was the first Virginia governor in the 20th century to send his children to integrated public schools.
Throughout Holton’s governorship, he remained at odds with much of the general public as he pushed to integrate schools and also appointed Black people to prominent positions within his administration, including Cabinet positions.
Today
Across the U.S., more than a third of students attended a school in 2021 in which 75% or more of the student population was of a single ethnicity, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“The trend in Virginia is certainly consistent with the national trend,” said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, D-3rd, senior member of Virginia’s congressional delegation. Scott, the Democrats’ ranking member on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, has called for the committee to hold hearings to examine the status of school integration 70 years after the Brown v. Board decision.
“Students are being denied an equal educational opportunity which is, according to Brown, a right, which must be made available on equal terms,” Scott said in an interview. “They’ve been denied this right ever since Brown,” he said.
“Even if the tangible factors are equal, segregation of students violates the rights of the minority. ... In virtually all cases," segregated schools "are almost always lower than the others — chronically underfunded, chronically less qualified teachers, and so the students are being denied.”