White Acceptance of Three Degrees of School Desegregation, 1974

A NUMBER OF RESEARCHERS have found that since the early 1940s, increasingly greater proportions of white Americans have accepted the end of dual educational systems based on racial segregation. From 1942 to 1965, the proportion of white adults believing that white and black students should be allowed to attend the same schools increased from thirty to sixty percent.1 This trend continued throughout the 1960s, even when one takes into account regional (South vs Non-South) residence.2 However, the general attitude toward school integration is a complex one. Levine3 and Schuman4 have noted that while token school integration may no longer be such an emotionally explosive issue, white parents become highly resistant to school integration under conditions where blacks may form a large or the largest proportion of the student body. That is, a person may accept school integration under one condition and reject it under others. Evidence exists to support this view that measuring attitudes toward school integration must take into account the situational factors of the degree of racial integration involved. From 1965 to 1970, the proportion of Southern white parents who objected to any form of school integration decreased from 44 percent to 18 percent. Northern parents remained constant (7 percent) during the above two points in time.5 However, during 1970, the two regions were roughly similar in the proportion (North: 52 percent; South: 57 percent) of whites who objected to school integration when blacks formed half or more of the student body. Given the fact that 1974 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown decision, it seems useful to investigate the degree of acceptance or rejection during 1974 of school integration on the part of whites. This paper therefore presents data describing the extent to which whites accepted three levels of school integration. Because similar data6 exist using 1965 and 1970 surveys, this paper partly extends

Desegregation · Political science · White (mutation) · Law · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology · School Choice and Performance

• Metropolitan school desegregation and parent and student attitudes

  Open Access•Margaret A Parsons•The Urban Review•1984

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