Before 1954, many states required Black and white children to attend separate schools, and Black schools received far less money. Brown v. Board of Education ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal. Real desegregation in the South came only after federal enforcement and rulings such as Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971), which approved busing.
Later rulings limited those gains. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court blocked a plan to desegregate Detroit schools across city and suburban district lines. In Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), it limited districts' voluntary use of race to assign students. Many court desegregation orders ended in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2022, the Government Accountability Office found that more than a third of students, about 18.5 million, attended schools where at least 75 percent of students were of a single race or ethnicity in 2020-21. School segregation matters because it tracks funding, teacher experience and course offerings, so separate schools are still unequal.