A Harvard University study, for example, looked at the 11 states of the old slave-holding Confederacy and found that the percentage of black students attending white schools rose from 2 per cent in 1964 to a high of 43 per cent in 1988, then started dropping to 31 per cent in 2000. One of the eroding factors was a set of court rulings that backed off earlier mandates for controversial bussing to achieve racial balance.
Bussing mandates of the 1970s, meant to overcome the persistent housing patterns that kept neighborhood schools segregated, provoked some of the fiercest resistance in Northern cities, such as Boston, Massachusetts, where sometimes violent protests continued for years. The state of Massachusetts still has a small program that hauls 3,200 minority students to 38 suburban communities, but the waiting list for non-white students living in and around Boston is five times that long.
Nonetheless, there have been real strides.
The percentage of US black students earning high school diplomas or better has more than quadrupled, from 18.4 per cent in 1957 to 79.2 per cent in 2002, according to the US census figures.
In that same time period, the high school graduation rate among whites roughly doubled, from 43.2 per cent with in 1957 to 88.7 per cent in 2002.
Just outside Rockville, at the Colonel Zadok Magruder High School in Derwood, Maryland, students produced a documentary film this year about Montgomery County's segregationist past, when black pupils had no schools or textbooks.
"It's shocking to know that Montgomery County was segregated once and how much it's changed today, because if you look at everyone now, you might never think that there was racism in this area," wrote one student quoted in the local newspaper.
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