Matthew Delmont: One of the challenges of talking about the Brown versus Board of Education story is you talk about the important Supreme Court decision. But then not much integration actually happens for a decade after the decision. And so it’s really a story about political reluctance to implement the decision, and then backlash, and then eventually you get there.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Matthew Delmont. Delmont is a Professor of History at Dartmouth University and an expert on African American and civil rights history. He’s written five books, the most recent of which is “Half American: The [Heroic] Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.”

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. During the last half of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, many states, including Kansas, had created school systems that separated white and black students by law. Kansas’s laws were comparatively mild, actually. Several southern states went further in mandating segregated education and also requiring private businesses to maintain segregated facilities. These laws applied to transportation companies, hotels, theaters, restaurants, and so on.

In the 1896 case of Plessy versus Ferguson, the Supreme Court had allowed this form of legalized segregation, upholding a Louisiana law that required trains to provide what it called equal but separate cars for white and black passengers. It was common knowledge that separate but equal was a fiction. When it came to trains or schools, the facilities provided to black Americans were never equal. But with Plessy versus Ferguson, the Supreme Court gave legalized segregation its stamp of approval. And that’s more or less how things worked in the U.S. South for the next 58 years.

Brown versus Board emerged out of a strategy by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to legally challenge the status quo. The NAACP financed and argued the case. The lead plaintiff was a man named Oliver Brown, a black man living in Topeka, Kansas, with his wife and three children. Mr. Brown objected to the fact that his daughter, Linda, who was eight years old when the lawsuit began, was forced to ride a school bus to the segregated black school on the other side of town when there was an all-white public school closer to their home.

And this time, the Supreme Court came out against segregation. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the unanimous decision, stating, quote, “In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities area inherently unequal.” The Brown decision was a major step towards the United States treating all of its citizens equally. But desegregating public education across the country was a much more complicated task than Warren’s stirring rhetoric might suggest.

In 1954, there were more than 60,000 school districts in the country, and each one of those had to apply the principles of Brown to the local circumstances. And many white parents and administrators resisted changed. In a 1956 poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, white Americans were equally split on the question of integration with 49 percent saying that white and black students should attend the same schools, 49 percent saying separate schools, and 2 percent saying they weren’t sure. Nearly a decade later in 1965, 30 percent of white Americans still openly stated their preference for segregated schools.

A lot of the conversation you’re about to hear is about the long and difficult process of desegregation that followed the Brown decision. But let’s fast forward to today. What’s the current status of school integration? Well, more than a third of American students still attend schools where 75 percent or more of students share the same racial or ethnic identity. And that’s true for almost half of white students in the country. Most black and Hispanic students attend schools where 75 percent or more of their classmates are students of color.

As a whole, American schools remain relatively segregated, and they also remain unequal. On average, per student spending is significantly lower at school districts with the most students of color as compared to districts with the whitest student bodies. It’s easy to look into the past and see racism. It gets harder the closer we get to the present. Education is an emotional issue, and it’s natural for parents to seek the best opportunities for their own children.

And educational segregation is related to residential segregation, which is related to racial disparities of wealth, which is largely a product of historical inequality. This is a big, complicated problem and not one we’re going to fix by finding a few individuals to label as racist. This is how systemic racism works. All of us are enmeshed in a system that is continuing to perpetuate racial inequities and, through the schools, passing on privilege and disadvantage from generation to generation.

Brown versus Board was a big step towards dismantling that system. But the work remains incomplete, and each of us has a responsibility to shoulder our share of the burden. If the job of desegregating American schools remains unfinished, that also means we can and should learn from how it’s been going so far, which means looking at our past, not only the triumph of Brown versus Board but also the difficult, conflicted, and incomplete integration process that followed. Matthew Delmont can help us understand that story.

Alex Lovit: Matthew Delmont, welcome to The Context.

Matthew Delmont: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.

Alex Lovit: So your research covers civil rights activism throughout the 20th century, and I want to talk about your work into the civil rights activism in the 1940s during World War II and the limitations of school integration during the 1970s and ‘80s. But this episode is timed for the 70th anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education, which was decided in May 1954; so that’s 70 years ago this month, and that’s kind of in the middle of that story. So let’s start with Brown.

I think most of our listeners will be aware that this is a Supreme Court decision that banned segregation in public schools. But can you paint a fuller picture here? What did Brown specifically say, and what did it not say?

Matthew Delmont: So I think it’s really important to celebrate and recognize the anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education decision. It is one of the landmark decisions in U.S. history and certainly in the history of civil rights. What the decision said was that de jure segregation or segregation by law was unconstitutional as it was practiced in southern school districts. So this is the kind of Jim Crow segregation, having officially black schools and officially white schools.

It overturned the Plessy versus Ferguson decision from the 1890s that had really established the legality of official legal segregation throughout the first half of the 20th century. And so it’s difficult to overstate how important that Supreme Court decision was. The things that Brown didn’t say, however—I think there are two things that I would highlight. The first is that it didn’t give an immediate timeline by which southern schools had to integrate.

And that was one of the big points of frustration for civil rights activists and civil rights lawyers, particularly folks down in the South. But because there wasn’t a timeline by which these schools had to start the integration process, it meant that white school officials were emboldened to really dig in their heels and prevent any meaningful integration happening in the South for nearly a decade afterwards.

The other important thing that Brown versus Board of Education didn’t say is that it didn’t address the kinds of segregation that existed outside of the South. It only really focused on the official de jure by law segregation that was practiced in the southern states. But as far as it’s shown particularly over the last two or three decades is that school districts in Chicago and New York and Boston and Los Angeles also practiced different forms of segregation. It wasn’t always as official as the kind of segregation that existed in the South. But it was [just] as harmful to black students in those schools.

Alex Lovit: I definitely want to talk about the experience of black students and black parents outside of the South later in this conversation. But let’s start with kind of what it looks like for the Brown decision says, okay, you can’t do this segregation anymore. And you think, the Supreme Court, what they say goes. But famously, they don’t have an army. And as you say, it takes quite some time and quite a lot of effort and violence in some cases to enforce this ruling.

Can you paint a brief picture of what happens over the next decade or two after the Brown decision in the southern segregated school districts?

Matthew Delmont: When you think about the implementation of the Brown versus Board of Education decision, it in theory applied to thousands of schools across the South. But as you say, the Supreme Court doesn’t have an army to force an implementation. And so it really relied on local activists, local school officials to determine whether schools were going to comply or not comply with the new decision that the Supreme court had handed down.

Immediately after, the following year, 1955, there’s a second part of the Brown versus Board of Education decision, Brown II, and that’s where the Supreme Court does offer some guidance in terms of the timing. They said this needs to happen with all deliberate speed. And the vagueness there is part of the problem. With all deliberate speed is interpreted by a lot of white school officials as meaning something close to never.

And so what happens in the course of the 1950s is you have black parents, black students, and their legal supporters trying to force the issue, trying to get the decision of Brown versus Board to actually apply to the on-the-ground situation in the South, actually have these schools be meaningfully integrated to improve the kind of opportunities and resources that are available to black students.

But in many cases, you have white school officials, parents and students pushing back and refusing to integrate those schools. Some of those received national attention. The Little Rock school integration crisis of 1957 is perhaps the most famous example. But these happened in dozens of different communities because it really is a town-by-town battle to determine the extent to which Brown versus Board will actually be the law of the land in the South.

And so when we think about that time period, it’s really a series of local stories and local actors that determine the extent to which the Supreme Court’s decision is actually going to be met in these different communities.

Alex Lovit: So one thing I’ve always found interesting about the Brown decision is that it was the first major civil rights ruling of the era and kind of kicked off an era of other civil rights judicial rulings and legislation. But it started in the schools, and the schools integrated before the buses did. Segregation and racism have always been emotional issues. A sense of racial superiority was important to the identity of many white Americans. And arguments about those supposed horrors of integration focused on highly emotional issues like interracial sex.

And of course, schools have always been sites of emotional politics because we tend to think of children as vulnerable. So it’s no coincidence that schools tend to be sites of culture wars, not just integration but also school prayer, sex education, recently controversies over DEI education. How do you think about this? Did the civil rights conflict play out differently in public education that in other spaces?

Matthew Delmont: I would say yes and no. Part of the legacy of Brown versus Board is that it was a strategic choice by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to choose to bring one of these first massive cases in terms of schools. There was a thinking that children would be more sympathetic as the face of this integration effort, that it might be in some ways less controversial than focusing on housing discrimination, which was also a paramount issue, or employment discrimination, which was also a very important issue.

And so I think the issues played out similarly in some ways because education was one of the constellation of issues that mattered deeply for civil rights activists. And one of the ways it played out differently was that I wouldn’t want to say civil rights activists underestimated the amount of resistance that was going to happen in the schools, but the level of backlash and official resistance to school integration was profound. And it had a chilling effect in some ways on the larger progress of how eager Americans were to think about the possibility of racial integration more broadly.

I think there are a series of important both legislative and policy victories that come after Brown versus Board in 1954. But I think also for a lot of white parents and white politicians, schools become one of the most important battlegrounds because they start linking every other issue to that issue—the issues of questions of interracial dating, interracial marriage; questions of housing policy and who’s going to be able to live in what communities; questions of who has the ability to access the kind of jobs that are going to prepare people for the middle class or more wealthy futures.

And so I think one of the difficult legacies of the Brown versus Board of Education decision is that it is a landmark and [other] things fall from it, but part of the story of telling that, recognizing the history of that landmark is recognizing how many Americans were unwilling to go along with the idea of meaningful school integration.

Alex Lovit: The stories you’re talking about, this is part of a much bigger picture of civil rights activism and judicial work and legislation during this period. So let’s pull back the lens a little bit and look at this larger period of the 1950s and ‘60s. A lot of Americans think of this as kind of the classic civil rights era. So you have the Brown versus Board in 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956, Freedom Rides in 1961, March on Washington 1963, Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So I’m just brushing past a lot of really important things there, but just to emphasize that this is a period of a lot of activity. I do think that sometimes this period is too often taught and understood in isolation. So it’s not that Martin Luther King, Jr., woke up one morning and decided, hey, somebody ought to do something about this segregation thing. I mean, this is part of a generations-long civil rights struggle.

But still, there is something about this period that a lot of stuff gets done in just a couple of short decades here. How do you think about that? How does this period of civil rights activism fit into the larger term of American history, and how does it stand out?

Matthew Delmont: I think one of the things historians emphasize almost always is the idea of continuity. And so absolutely, the ‘50s and ‘60s are an extremely important time period for the history of civil rights, both in terms of the visibility of civil rights protests, the willingness of more Americans to support, at least at a high level, the aims of the civil rights movement, and then in terms of the important legislation and policies that are passed.

I think part of what happens in that couple of decades is, coming into the 1950s, you have this groundswell of activism that has built up, particularly in the World War II era. It starts to come to fruition in the 1950s, both at the local level in terms of grassroots activism but also then at the national level. You start to get more national attention, particularly in white and mainstream media, to the demands and organizing among black activists all across the country.

That’s a really important development that happens particularly around the Montgomery bus boycott and the Brown versus Board of Education decision. And then the successes and in some cases the setbacks, they build on each other. And so part of having that groundswell of activism receiving more attention is it makes it easier to attract more people to the movement.

And so you have both local people in different communities but then also college students who are willing to dedicate themselves and their lives to helping to advance these causes, so thinking about the Freedom Riders, for example, and the young people who volunteered to be part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. That gets us into the early ‘60s.

But part of that history is understanding how each generation builds on the work of the previous generation and how they try to move the causes forward, to move the ball forward, so to speak. I think throughout that history, you [still get] this sense that the movement’s moving two steps forward and one step back. The reality is when you look at the history of civil rights activism, there was never complete support among Americans generally speaking for the aims of the civil rights movement.

It’s easy to look back today and say, yes, everyone understood the importance of desegregating schools or desegregating buses or desegregating workplaces and housing. But the reality is that the causes that Martin Luther King was fighting for, Rosa Parks was fighting for, a dozen other activists, they were [ultimately] very unpopular at the time, and they received intense pushback, including in many cases violence.

And so I think part of telling the story of the ‘50s and ‘60s accurately is understanding that it didn’t come out of nowhere, that it built on previous generations of activism, but also that it was constantly faced with pushback and backlash and that activists had to find creative, resourceful ways to try to outflank that resistance.

Alex Lovit: So you’re telling a story there of how the movement builds on itself and how it built on previous models. And you mentioned World War II as a period of civil rights activism that obviously immediately precedes the ‘50s and ‘60s and does help to set the model in some ways. But you wrote a whole book on this, the book, “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.” Let’s talk a little bit about that book and about the World War II era.

And I think a good way of getting into that is the Double V or Double Victory campaign launched by the black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier,” and promoted by the NAACP. Can you just explain, what is this idea of Double Victory?

Matthew Delmont: So Double Victory is really the rallying cry for black Americans during World War II. It stood for fighting for both victory over fascism abroad but also victory over racism at home. And I’m a teacher; I taught about World War II in the classroom for more than a decade. But it wasn’t until I got into the research for this book that I really fully recognized that Double Victory wasn’t just a cover or a slogan or a rhetorical device. It really was how black Americans viewed the time period.

They were absolutely committed to helping to win the war militarily, helping defeat the Nazis and Axis powers. But they recognized it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to achieve military victory and then come home to very similar forms of racial discrimination and white supremacy here in the United States. And so when we think about that time period of World War II, we have to think about the military battlefields and the home front battlefields for civil rights as being intertwined because that’s how black Americans at the time understood them.

I think one entry point to this is the title of the book, “Half American,” comes from a letter that a man named James G. Thompson wrote. James Thompson was a 26-year-old in Wichita, Kansas. And in late December 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he writes this letter to “The Pittsburgh Courier,” which was the largest and most influential black newspaper in the country. It’s a really remarkable letter, asked a series of very pressing and pointed questions.

But he asked in part, “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Is the America I know worth defending?” And that phrase, “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American,” really stuck with me. It’s why I chose that as the title of the book. “The Pittsburgh Courier” used Thompson’s letter to launch this Double Victory campaign. But I think what’s powerful about what Thompson was asking is he recognized that he and other black Americans were about to be asked to fight for, potentially die for a country that treated them as second-class citizens.

And so part of telling the story of [unintelligible] thinking about how it sets the stage for what happens in the ‘50s and ‘60s sets the stage for the Brown versus Board decision and everything that comes after it is that a whole generation of black Americans that recognized the hypocrisy of the United States fighting a war for freedom and democracy while they don’t have that same freedom and democracy themselves.

But even more than that, they dedicate themselves to winning the war, but then the whole generation of black veterans come back, and they keep fighting. In the words of one black veteran, they went from fighting in the European theater of operations to fighting in the southern theater of operations. And so they become leaders in the civil rights movement in communities all over the country.

I think another important piece of it is during World War II, the infrastructure of civil rights really gets built out across the country. Ella Baker is one of the people I right about in the book. She’s an incredibly important grassroots activist. She was well known for her work SNCC in the 1960s. But during World War II, she was the head of branch membership for the NAACP. And so she traveled all across the country, helping to organize local people to be able to fight for their rights, fight for issues like school segregation, fight for voting rights, fight for housing integration, fight against employment discrimination.

What was important about Ella Baker’s work is that she held leadership training workshops all across the country to help prepare these local folks to be able to fight for themselves. One of the people who attended one of those leadership training workshops was Rosa Parks in 1945 in Atlanta, fully a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott.

So if you picture a map of the United States and think about how many communities had organized civil rights organizations, that map was relatively sparse in 1941. But 1945, there are dots all over that map. We have local people who are prepared to work together to fight for the issues that matter to them. And so the infrastructure’s in place by 1945, and it just keeps generating. It generates new ideas, new organizing tactics, new energy, and new leaders.

And it’s impossible to understand where the 1950s civil rights movement comes from if you don’t understand that previous moment of civil rights organizing during World War II.

Alex Lovit: So the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had already been the sort of premier—I believe, premier civil rights organization, and it was founded in 1909—it had been around a long time. But it’s during World War II that it really becomes this mass membership organization. So you write the number of branches almost triples, and the number of individual memberships increases by a factor of nine. That’s something that I think is important when you’re talking about building that infrastructure during the war that then after the war is really effective.

I do want to ask about kind of this activism during the war. So we were earlier talking about this period of the 1950s and ‘60s and some of the greater successes there and some of the factors that go into that. There were also some successes during the war itself. For example, in 1941 Philip Randolph is the president of the largest black union in the country, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And he threatens to lead a march of 10,000 blacks to Washington, D.C., in protest of racist hiring practices in the war industries.

And President Franklin Roosevelt is sufficiently threatened by that that he signs Executive Order 8802, which mandated racially equitable hiring in war production. And that order had plenty of limitations and wasn’t fully enforced, but it still had some practical effects. For me, that’s an example of there is an opportunity during the war to make some substantive progress on civil rights that maybe that opportunity hadn’t existed prior to the war.

How do you think about that? What factors go into the successes of Randolph’s campaign or other civil rights campaigns during the war?

Matthew Delmont: So it’s all about political power and political leverage. Black Americans throughout history have recognized the ways they’ve been treated unjustly and unfairly and have fought back against it. Part of what changes on the eve of World War II though is they recognized that the country is going to need them in different ways, and the country and political leadership is vulnerable to this mass mobilization.

At the same time, you have organizations like A. Philip Randolph in the March on Washington movement who are able to bring together black Americans nationally and be able to speak with one voice to make demands that force politicians to listen to them. And so in that summer of 1941, as the defense industries are being built up all across the country, black Americans are largely blocked from those very important jobs, A. Philip Randolph threatens to lead, as you say, initially it was going to be 10,000, but then he keeps upping the number. It goes from 10,000 to 50,000 and eventually to 100,000, claiming he’s going to bring all these black people from all across the country.

And there are chapters of the March on Washington movement that take shape in different parts of the country with different captains that are stationed across the country. That was important because it was a threat that was on a scale that Roosevelt and other politicians had never seen before, the idea that if this were to come to pass, it would embarrass the United States on the national stage to have a hundred thousand of their own citizens, their own black citizens marching together, demanding access to these war jobs.

It’s that leverage that gives Randolph the ability to negotiate with Roosevelt in these kind of high stakes negotiations to get him—pressure him to sign that executive order that, as you said, at least on paper, did open up those defense industry jobs to black Americans. But part of the long-term legacy of that is it’s not just about the executive order. It demonstrates that if black Americans are prepared to work together and speak vocally and make demands, now the White House and different political parties have to listen to them.

It also comes at the exact moment that the democratic party recognizes that black Americans are going to become an increasingly important part of their future. And so that’s part of the calculus that goes into all the decisions that Roosevelt makes during the war and then eventually Truman makes after the war. That’s important. It’s crass politics in many ways, but it’s an important recognition of black Americans as a voting block.

The other thing that the March on Washington movement does is even thought that March is called off in 1941 in exchange for the executive order, it lays the blueprint for the March on Washington in 1963. And so a lot of the same ideas that had been in the air or in the water, so to speak, in 1941, those come to fruition in 1963. By that point, Randolph is the grandfather of the movement. But he’s there and he’s really been the architect of that idea all along, helping to bring people from all across the country to march in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate on behalf of civil rights and to make these demands.

And so thinking about what it means to organize people across the country to come together to make specific demands of what they’d like to see changed. That’s part of the power and the dynamism that shows up during the war years.

Alex Lovit: So another aspect of the war is the way that it caused people to kind of move around the planet but also within the United States. So you have black troops from the North that are stationed in military bases in the South and vice versa. And also, you have the great migration, which is this movement of human populations so big that we call it the great migration, which is about six million African Americans moving throughout the kind of middle decades of the 20th century. So the [war issue]’s only one part of that story, but it’s an important part of that story.

Can you kind of tell this story of how are people moving within the United States, and how are they encountering sort of different forms of racism as they’re traveling?

Matthew Delmont: That’s an incredibly important part of the larger story of the 20th century is the great migration, both of African Americans but also of white Americans as well. For black Americans, there were two main factors that led to the great migration. One was the extent of racism in the South. In many ways, this was black people being pushed out of local communities, in some cases being terrorized to the extent that they felt that they had no choice but to leave.

And when we think about what it meant to leave, it was leaving behind families, leaving behind property they may have owned, leaving behind everything that you knew and were familiar with to take your chances in New York or in Detroit or in Chicago or in Los Angeles. It was a massive decision. And part of why people took that step was how violent and horrific the conditions of Jim Crow segregation were. And so it’s important not to understate that reality.

The other main motivation was jobs. Particularly as the defense industries took shape in the North, there were economic opportunities that existed in major northern cities that drew African American migrants there in massive numbers. And I think it’s important for this story in particular to think about the sort of Brown versus Board and afterwards is the scale and scope of some of these cities and their school districts changes dramatically from 1940 to 1960. Think about Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York.

There had been black populations there, relatively sizeable in some cases, but they’re much, much larger by 1950-1960 than they were in 1930 or 1940. Those southern migrants are, in some cases, squeezed into all black ghettoes, tenement housing. And so they don’t come with the kind of resources that are going to prepare them for economic or educational success in these [interim] cities. And then they’re given limited opportunities both in terms of employment but also in terms of education once they arrive there.

The other piece of why it’s important to know that millions of white Americans moved as well is that you have intense competition for jobs, for neighborhoods, for housing, and then for schools as well. And so we can’t understand the way that school desegregation played out, particularly in the North, Midwest, and West if we don’t understand how many people left the South pursuing new opportunities and new futures. But how they pursued new opportunities and new futures in many ways put them in conflict with other migrants or with people who had already been settled in these cities.

The common refrain for a lot of black Americans was that they went to the North thinking it was going to be the promised land, but it was the promised land that wasn’t because racism has never been a uniquely southern phenomenon. Racism has existed and continues to exist in northern cities, in the Midwest and the West. It often operated differently than the way it did in the South.

It wasn’t always the kind of in-your-face explicit Jim Crow style of racism where you have white drinking fountains and black drinking fountains. But through a combination of discriminatory real estate practices, discriminatory school zoning decisions, and market forces, it would just so happen that you would have all black neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and then those would be zoned to create almost exclusively black, low-income schools in those same areas.

Alex Lovit: So I want to ask about one last question on kind of this World War II era. Brown in 1954 is often the first paragraph in the chapter of the civil rights textbook. And it is in some ways the kickoff point for what becomes a very large-scale movement that we’ve already talked about. But one thing that I got from your book that I hadn’t thought as much about is the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. So that’s actually the first large-scale, American institution, federal institution that is desegregated.

So throughout World War II, units are segregated. There were specific black units. And now after the war is over, Truman issues this order saying that the armed forces will be desegregated. Obviously, they’re also demobilizing at the time and becoming smaller. Is that an important inflection point? What role does that decision play in the civil rights movement that follows?

Matthew Delmont: I absolutely think that we should talk as much if not more about the 1948 executive order that desegregated the military. And I think that for a few reasons. One, it was incredibly important for President Truman to take that step of desegregating the military. It’s something that black Americans had been calling for for more than a decade. I mean, take a step back and think about it. There was no strategic or tactical reason to have a segregated military.

In fact, it was the opposite. It was costly, inefficient. It meant that it was literally someone’s job to make sure that the recreation facilities and toilets and barracks and troop transfers were all segregated. That wasn’t efficient. That meant that the military was doing almost everything in duplicate. The Red Cross went as far as to segregate blood from blood donors during World War II, even though there’s no scientific basis to do that.

A lot of black critics of the time during the war said that troops likely lost their lives because the segregation meant that you didn’t have the best people in the best positions to do the most important work. They only looked at the color of someone’s skin and assigned them to more subservient roles. And so it was really important for President Truman to show that kind of political leadership and political courage to desegregate the military.

And then I think what’s important about that story is that the military is integrated by the end of the Korean War in 1953, even though a lot of military leaders, probably most white officers in 1948, don’t want to see that happen. A number of people dig in their heels. Truman shows leadership and actually removes the head of the Army because he’s unwilling to comply with the executive order.

And so I think part of why it’s important to tell the story of Brown versus Board alongside the story of the executive order of 1948 that desegregated the military is that the timelines play out very differently. Because people in positions of power forced the hand of the military, that decision actually gets implemented much faster than Brown versus Board does.

And I also think it’s one of the best examples we have of massive institutional change. The military, most average white officers, they might have held prejudiced views themselves, but they recognized, first, this is the new policy, but also they sort of recognized when they saw the performance of black troops in World War II, we’re going to be a more effective fighting force if we’re integrated and we can actually use the manpower or the person power of every American citizen.

Even if they didn’t hold particularly enlightened views on race themselves, they still recognized that, as an institution, the military was going to be more effective. That doesn’t happen easily, and it doesn’t happen overnight. And it’s not to say that racism didn’t still exist in the military. But the distance that the military traveled from 1948 to 1953 in taking meaningful steps to integrate provide lessons to almost any organization in American society today because the military went further faster than most of higher education did, most of corporate America did.

And I would even say taking the story several decades in the future, the military’s maintained a leadership role because they’ve had to think longer and harder about this because they have to draw on every demographic of the country to fill the number of people they need in their ranks. And so I do think it’s very important to tell those stories together because one of the challenges of talking about the Brown versus Board of Education story is you talk about the important Supreme Court decision, but then not much integration actually happens for a decade after the decision.

And so it’s really a story about political reluctance to implement the decision, and then backlash, and then eventually you get there. But the military integration, it was just as controversial at the time but, because of stronger leadership, you actually see some changes on the ground.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, I agree that that’s an important part of the story. And I think most Americans aren’t used to thinking of the military as kind of a progressive organization. But in this way, it kind of has been on the forefront of integration. We’ve been telling this kind of big story—integration of the whole U.S. military, you know, millions of people moving around the country. Let me ask another kind of big question about what’s playing into the civil rights movement at this era.

Part of the story of how civil rights legislation gets passed, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act being the most important two and really significant legislation that, if not completely made us into a racial utopia, did significantly end formal legalized segregation. And this playing out at the same time that there’s sort of this realignment of the two major political parties.

So the republican party had historically been the part of Lincoln, was the party that ended slavery. American blacks tended to support republican candidates in the early 20th century, at least when they were allowed to vote, which wasn’t that often. And the democratic party had historically been the party of white southern segregationists.

And there were divisions on civil rights and these issues within both parties but, in general, the partisan division was kind of like that in the early 20th century. And then something strange starts to happen around the middle of the 20th century, as you were talking about, with Roosevelt starting to think about the power of Randolph and the black political movement. And the democrats start supporting civil rights reforms, and black Americans start to switch their party allegiance.

In the former Confederate states, it takes a while, but flipped from being solidly democratic to mostly today it’s solidly republican. And it’s kind of in the middle of this reorientation that civil rights legislation passes with significant support from both political parties at the time. How do you think about that big picture story of how the civil rights movement interacts with this political realignment?

Matthew Delmont: That’s a good question, and a big one. I think part of the story is civil rights activists, and it’s black Americans more broadly, have always had to be strategic and tactical in thinking about how they will use their votes to try to advance the cause of freedom for black Americans. That is a different point in time led to different strategic alliances and different decisions about which party to support.

In that World War II time period is when you start to see more African Americans starting to align with the democratic party. And then by Kennedy’s election, it’s when you start to see a full movement, upwards of 85 percent, aligning with the democratic party and hasn’t really gone back since them. Part of that is, throughout that period, civil rights activists asked each political party to have meaningful planks in their party platform dedicated to civil rights and then to demonstrate they’re actually going to take the steps necessary to implement policies that would support the aspirations of black Americans.

It always has been easy for politicians to make good speeches and to say the right things. But the real question was, what actual actions are you going to take. Words matter much less than actions. And so part of the leverage that black voters increasingly had in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s is the ability to hold parties to account, to actually get politicians to get the Presidents to listen to them and say we need actual legislation to address these things.

Truman wouldn’t have signed that executive order in 1948 if he didn’t recognize the political power that black voters had, particularly in key swing states. I think that, as a veteran himself, he also recognized the importance of taking this step for the military. But the most important thing was the political power that black voters brought to bear. That was true in the 1950s, and it’s definitely true once you get to the 1960s with Kennedy and then with President Johnson.

At the same time, part of telling that story is politics is tricky. And when you look at those different pieces of legislation that are passed, there almost always were caveats or loopholes written into it to be able to get the support of different politicians. The thing about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, incredibly important legislation.

But one of the challenges for it, particularly for black Americans who cared about school integration outside of the South, is that there were loopholes written into that legislation that essentially put barriers around northern school districts and said we’re going to define segregation to be only the kind of segregation that we see existing in the South. We’re not going to define segregation to be what they call racial imbalance, the kind of accidental or market-based segregation that they said existed in northern cities.

That comes at the behest of northern politicians, liberals, democrats who are in support of civil rights broadly but are less enthusiastic about the demands of civil rights activists in their own cities. And so I think when we try to trace that trajectory from the ‘40s to the ‘50s and ‘60s, at the national level it’s certainly the case that black voters have more influence on the decisions that certainly the democratic party is making, but even to some extent republican legislators are willing to make.

But when you drill down a little bit, then you see some variation regionally in terms of how eager white politicians are to risk the wrath or backlash of white voters in their own communities.

Alex Lovit: Okay. So we’ve got a lot of things going on here. We’ve got great migration. We’ve got major political realignments. Let’s talk about one more big change happening at this time, which is technological change in media. So at this time, television is the big shift. In 1948, less than one percent of American households owned a television, and less than a decade later in 1955, 75 percent of American households had a television.

What role did this technological innovation have in how civil rights protests played out and were understood in the 1950s and ‘60s?

Matthew Delmont: So television was extremely important, particularly for the civil rights movement in the South. It helped to bring the civil rights protests in the South to national audiences. It made people aware of what was happening in a visceral way. One of the common refrains was it made Mississippi come alive to people in Minnesota. Part of the importance of that story is black activists were savvy. They recognized this. They held their protests at times of day when they knew television stations—national television stations would be able to be on site to be able to film those protests.

Martin Luther King and others staged confrontations with white sheriffs, white politicians, white townspeople who they knew would react in such ways that demonstrated the violence of state-sanctioned segregation. So part of the strategy of nonviolence, it wasn’t a passive tactic. It was a form of activism that revealed some of the hidden violence that had always been there in the South but now revealed it for television cameras to see it and then be able to broadcast it to people all across the country.

That was important because it did move the needle in terms of how much average white Americans were willing to support the demands of black southern civil rights activists. Seeing the repetition if these protests in these cases from Montgomery to Little Rock to Selma, it galvanized people to care about issues that they didn’t see as directly impacting their own communities, but they saw it as something that nationally had to be addressed.

And so it’s an incredibly important part of telling the story. And the other layer I would add in is that that story is true when you focus on the South. The story becomes less true when you focus outside the South. These mainstream media organizations, particularly television news, were much less enthusiastic about covering civil rights protests as they were happening in Chicago, in New York, in Boston, even those were certainly happening in the ‘50s and ‘60s simultaneously with the protests that were happening the South.

But they didn’t register in the same way for northern media producers in part because, for a lot of white Americans in the North, they didn’t think segregation actually existed in their cities. They thought segregation was just—segregation and racism were just southern things. And so that’s also an important part of the story we have to tell about media in this time period.

Alex Lovit: So now we’re moving into your book, “Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation.” And a major lesson that I learned from the book is what you’re talking about, is that the way that the media framed coverage of school desegregation in the North was quite different from the way it was framed in the South. Let’s talk about in practical terms, how did school segregation look different in the North than in the South, and what did it share in common?

Matthew Delmont: The big difference was that in the North, school officials would insist until they’re blue in the face that they hadn’t officially segregated the schools. In the South, everyone [unintelligible] what was going on. You had black schools and white schools and, by and large, no one made any claims to the contrary. That’s just how the system was set up. In the North, school officials refused to admit or they’d convinced themselves that they hadn’t taken any active steps to segregate schools.

But the facts on the ground, when you looked at the racial demographics of these different schools in major urban cities, is the majority of schools were 90 percent or more black or 90 percent or more white. So the kind of reality on the ground was segregation, and everyone could see that, particularly for black parents and students. And for civil rights activists, they’re looking around in the mid-1950s in Boston and Chicago and New York and saying, “Our schools are segregated.”

When Brown versus Board of Education happens, the first thing people in New York do is say, “What about us? Like what about our schools? We see that they’re segregated here. Why can’t something be done about them?” But the big roadblock they encounter, and it’s a huge roadblock, is that school officials say, “No, we didn’t segregate those schools. It was market forces,” that people were able to buy homes or rent homes or apartments in this neighborhood and they go to those schools. They’re able to buy homes in that neighborhood, they go to those schools.

It just so happens that those are black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. “We didn’t do anything about it. We’re innocent.” The language that was used was de facto segregation. They called segregation in the South de jure segregation, segregation by law. They called segregation in the North de facto segregation; it’s market forces by accident. That was important because it meant in order for courts to do anything about the kind of segregation that exists in the North, civil rights activists and their lawyers had to be able to prove that intentional and unconstitutional steps had been taken to segregate those schools.

And that’s part of why it takes so long for these school segregation cases to make it through the courts and then to actually get implemented in major [unintelligible] cities because it’s incredibly complex and time consuming to be able to go back and demonstrate that over a two- or three-decade time period that zoning decisions have been made in order to segregate these schools. But once these cases start to get to courts in the 1960s and ‘70s, they do show that in most cases there were intentional efforts made by school officials to segregate the schools.

But the big difference when you look at North and South was that in the South, there was clarity about segregation existing. In the North, segregation existed for everyone to see, but the people in power said we didn’t do it.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, so I think a lot of your work is kind of exploding this myth of de jure versus de factor in pointing out that supposedly, de facto, accidental segregation in the North, which is largely housing segregation, that was itself a product of policy, of local policy, federal policy. And so we previously discussed the role of this new medium of television in the South, and you mentioned that the coverage tended to be different in the North.

And you said that black civil rights protesters in the South were pretty self-conscious about how they could use television as a tool to appeal to larger audiences. And the same is true for anti-integration protesters in the North who sometimes explicitly drew on models from the civil rights movement that they were kind of largely opposing. So we mentioned two marches on Washington, the one that didn’t happen in 1941, the one that did happen in 1963.

Yet another one happened in 1972 led by antibusing activist Irene McCabe, who walked from Pontiac, Michigan, to Washington, D.C. You argue that her protest was sparsely attended and received more media attention than it really deserved. But what lessons were people like McCabe learning from the civil rights movement?

Matthew Delmont: I think one thing that surprised me as an historian working on this book was that some of the people who paid the closest attention to black civil rights activists in the South and their success using the media were white antibusing protesters in northern cities. They understood very clearly that if they could frame their protests in certain ways, they could receive very similar kinds of media attention.

And so part of the story I [unintelligible] in the book is showing how savvy these anti-integration protesters were in northern cities in terms of framing their marches and their protest techniques to very closely resemble what had been going on in the South. In 1964, Irene McCabe, Pontiac housewife and mother in the early 1970s, becomes a media figure after Judge Damian Keith in Pontiac makes a ruling that finds that Pontiac schools had intentionally segregated their schools, and he orders Pontiac to implement a busing decision to help to desegregate those schools.

That actual court decision itself receives very little media coverage. What receives a huge amount of coverage is Irene McCabe who, with a number of other mothers, says she’s going to march for 600 miles from Pontiac, Michigan, to Washington, D.C. And so all three television stations are on the ground in Pontiac to pick up the rally where she leaves. There’s newspaper coverage of her march along the route. There’re pictures of her icing her feet because they’re so sore from all the walking she’s been doing, all this very sympathetic coverage of how she’s suffering on behalf of her cause.

And then when they get to Washington, D.C., again all three major television stations are there. Only 1200 people showed up to the actual rally, but millions of people saw this march on TV. And again, McCabe was very savvy in how she protested integration. She never said, “I don’t want my kids to go to school with black kids.” She said, “I’m opposed to busing. I’m in support of neighborhood schools.”

And so when we think about why it was so hard to get meaningful school integration, particularly in these northern cities, we have to understand that the media, well, television and the media more broadly, paid a powerful role in supporting black civil rights activism in the South from, we can say, about ‘55 to ‘65, the story looked very different outside of the South because, once these white anti-integration protesters recognized as long as you don’t say anything racist and as long as you use the correct code words to oppose integration, you can receive very favorable coverage yourself. Media actually do more to support the anti-integration cause than it does support desegregation.

Alex Lovit: So the argument you’re making there and the argument you make in the book is largely about how media figures and political figures frame this issue of school integration and the way that the media kind of focus on the sympathetic coverage of these protesters and ignoring the perspective of black children experiencing racism in their quest for high-quality education. I sometimes think it’s easy to blame media or politicians, just harder to say that, well, the public was racist, that people were—white Americans were reacting negatively at this time.

And of course, the media are chasing viewers, and the politicians are chasing voters. How do you think about the interaction between these kind of opinion leaders of media or political figures and kind of just the largely mass resistance among the white public at this time to school integration?

Matthew Delmont: That’s a good question. I think I would say that they worked in concert to fuel the worst impulses of average white Americans in these different communities. A lot of the pushback that school integration received was that it was scary to envision something changing. People by and large liked their schools, and they didn’t want anything to change about them. They were worried that if new sets of students came, it was going to mean new things. Or if their students had to go to schools across town, they were going to receive a worse education.

The communities that did better with school desegregation had time to be able to weather that initial wave of resistance and initial wave of pushback and worked together to find solutions that were going to be in the best interests of their community and the best interests of their region. Media coverage worked against that because it poured gasoline on the flames. It made that initial wave of pushback so much more intense that it was much harder for people to take a deep breath, show patience, and be willing to work together and made it harder for leaders in those communities to show the political will to stick with things beyond a month, two months, or six months.

I certainly can’t blame media for creating racist sentiments or prejudice in any part of American society. Media often just reflect what’s going on. But they did make decisions on which stories to cover and not cover and how to cover those stories. My main critique as an historian is that they did very little work to try to give average viewers any sense of the nuance, depth, history, real complexity of these court cases.

Alex Lovit: So we started this conversation talking about Brown versus Board in 1954 and how that kind of opened the door for the next couple of decades of activism across the country about school integration. I want to ask about Milliken versus Bradley, which was decided in 1974 and played a big role, if not in totally bringing to a close, at least kind of closing the door on a chapter of school integration fights. So this is the 70th anniversary of Brown. It’s also the 50th anniversary of Milliken.

So what was the Milliken decision, and what effects did it have on the fight for integrated and equitable education?

Matthew Delmont: This is another one where it’s important for us to tell the Milliken story alongside the Brown story. It’s impossible to understand the legacy of Brown if you don’t understand the story of Milliken. So the Milliken decision in brief was a court case about school segregation in Detroit. And the important outcome of that was that the judge ruled that, yes, while there was school segregation that existed in Detroit and that the Detroit School Board needed to do something to remedy it, the outlying communities, suburban communities could be forced to be involved in the integration order unless each one had been shown to also have intentionally participated in segregation.

What that meant practically was it was an enormous barrier for any legal team to be able to prove not just segregation in a city as large as Detroit going back decades, but also to be able to prove it in dozens of suburban communities. The upshot was it meant that there was an escape hatch for white families or any families that had the resources to be able to move out of a city like Detroit into any of these suburban areas where the schools were more segregated both racially and socioeconomically.

By that point, there’d already been a whole generation of white flight, a euphemism for white people leaving—white people who had the resources to being able to leave central cities to be able to go to suburbs. But what it meant practically was that there was no legal recourse or practical way for these large, increasingly minority cities to be able to have meaningful integration within city boundaries. There was no way for a Chicago or a Newark or a Philadelphia to involve the suburbs in their school integration policies unless they voluntarily did it.

So Milliken is a bookend to Brown, but it’s also the kind of sad coda or epigraph that explains why, when you look at schools today, you still have extremely high levels of both racial and socioeconomic segregation despite the nice words on paper that exist in the Brown versus Board of Education decision.

Alex Lovit: You were earlier talking about your critique of the media and how the media framed the protests over school integration in the North. And a lot of this framing was through this word busing. So instead of saying integration, you say busing, and then it’s easier to say I’m opposed to busing. And the media really picked up on that frame. And then to some extent, in our historical memory, we continue to call it busing.

So your book is interesting because of the title is “Why Busing Failed.” I mean, busing is right there in the title. But every time you use the word busing in the book, it’s in quotes. I mean, you’re really trying to critique that frame. How do you understand yourself as a historian and your role in trying to reframe the story and influence how we think about our past?

Matthew Delmont: So I appreciate your picking up on busing being in quotes throughout the book. The reason I use it in quotes throughout the book is that I do want to call attention to it was a politically [moded] term. It was a political code word that smuggled in a lot of perspectives and desires without ever explicitly saying them. I think for me as an historian, I think it’s important to talk about that period of school desegregation and school integration, of which the use of school buses was one tactic among many that courts could potentially order in order to produce more meaningful school desegregation.

I think the problem was once that whole movement got linked to just a single term of busing, it made it very easy to appear as though somehow the school buses themselves were the problem or, I think even worse, that it was white parents and white students who were the victims in the whole situation, that when you have white parents marching and saying we oppose busing, we support neighborhood schools, it looks as though they’re the ones who are bearing the brunt of these unfair court decisions when, if you look at the context of where those court decisions came from, why the judges required school buses to be used to promote school desegregation, the reason buses were being used in that way is because these school districts have been found to have made intentional zoning decisions, intentional policy decisions over prior decades that unconstitutionally segregated their schools.

And so part of what I think happened with how busing got taken up both in the media but also by politicians and by a number of school officials was that it made school desegregation be a story that was about the preferences and fears of white parents rather than about the Constitutional rights of black students. It’s wrong historically, and it’s wrong ethically in terms of what was actually at stake in those cases.

And as somebody who’s interested in political language, I think it was a savvy choice that opponents of integration made to link their claims to an opposition to busing as opposed to saying we don’t want black kids in our schools. But I think my responsibility as an historian, and I think our responsibility as citizens who want to understand the past, is to understand how people have leveraged different words to seek outcomes that disadvantage different people.

So I think in this case, busing was used to maintain racial segregation of schools that disadvantaged black and Latino students. And so part of my strong emphasis in trying to call attention to busing as a political code word was just that, to try to get people to recognize that when they talk about this period, they should be attuned to just say busing did this or busing did that, or Boston busing crisis. The crisis in Boston wasn’t busing. It was that the Boston School Committee intentionally segregated those schools over the prior couple of decades, right?

And that in order to tell that story with any accuracy, you don’t start in 1974. You start two decades earlier with black [unintelligible] activists who are doing everything they can to try to force that issue under the table.

Alex Lovit: So we’ve talked about the kind of broad scope of school integration fights in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s. How do you understand the current status of school integration and equitable education in this country? And if we want to be a truly equitable and inclusive society, what lessons can we learn from the past?

Matthew Delmont: I think on the second question first, if we want to be a more equitable society, we have to make specific policy choices that will lead us in more equitable directions. I think the system we have today is a product of decades and decades of intentional decisions that, in some cases, have moved us closer to equity, but in many cases have either entrenched the status quo or have intensified the gaps and inequalities that we’ve always had in the system.

And so if we want to see a different system today, we have to make a different set of choices. I would say I know less about school integration in the present as a historian. But I think what I’ve observed is some of the things that have changed—obviously, the racial demographics of the country are more multiracial, more complex than they were in the 1950s and ‘60s, and they don’t always map as neatly under socioeconomic status.

To think for people who are studying these issues or working on these issues today, being [related—attuned to] the realities of how race and class have always intersected, but how you can’t just automatically assume that black students are going to be poor, white students are going to be affluent, that you have to attuned to the particularities of whatever different school system you’re looking at.

The other piece is that the kind of schooling options that exist today between public schools, charter schools, private schools, religious schools, in some cases for-profit schools are all so much more complex than what was going on in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And so I don’t have a solution or an easy answer there, but I think the overarching question is if we value quality education for all students, we have to work together to make policy decisions that are going to support that, not just for my students, for your students, for one’s own family, but support that at neighborhood, community, regional, and then eventually national levels.

I think it’s too easy when you think about education to focus on what’s best for me and my family. And that’s understandable. I mean, I’m a parent. My kids are in sixth and fourth grade. I’m always going to think first about what’s going on with my kids. But as a citizen, I have to think beyond just that very narrow scope and think about, how can we support policy decisions that are going to better the educational opportunities for people nationally because, ultimately, that’s going to put our communities and our country in a better position.

If we provide better educational opportunities, it means the next generation of citizens would also—people working in different capacities have more abilities. If we don’t provide those educational opportunities, it means the opposite. We’re not going to have the same kind of capacities in our nation at large.

Alex Lovit: Well, I think that’s a good note to end on and an important reminder that policy decisions matter. And if we want to have a society that works for the benefit of all Americans, we have to pay attention to that. But the good news about living in a democracy is it’s in our hands. We can make these decisions. Matthew Delmont, thank you for joining me on The Context.

Matthew Delmont: Thanks very much for having me.

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. If you liked the show, please consider leaving us a rating or a review. And if you ever find yourself telling a friend about something you heard on this podcast, please recommend that they check it out. I’m Alex Lovit, a Senior Program Officer and Historian with the Foundation. Research Assistance by Isabel Pergande, Episode Production by George Drake, Jr. Kettering’s Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore.

There are other people who help out on the show who aren’t usually in the end credits, so today I wanted to give a shoutout to Jamaal Bell. Jamaal is a Creative Strategy Manager at Kettering, and among his many job responsibilities, he creates the art for each episode and helps us produce the videoclips we post on social media. Thanks, Jamaal.

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