Article 7: The Influence of the Cold War on the Racial Desegregation of American Schools

With the rise of the Cold War, federal officials in the United States sought to end the racial segregation that the U.S. Supreme Court had accepted in the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. Although the reforms began with changes in the armed services, they moved to reduce racial segregation in schools. In part, the impetus for the reforms was the recognition that communist agents pointed to racial discrimination and prejudice to show the rest of the world that the United States could not live up to its ideal of democracy. When federal agencies moved slowly, a public campaign to end racial segregation overtook the official efforts and pushed the federal government to speed up racial integration. With the advent of urban riots and the fighting in Vietnam, public sentiment turned against efforts to bring about racial justice by 1969. At the same time, civil rights advocates, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., attended to the problems of war and poverty thereby diminishing the fight against segregation. When the U.S. Supreme Court began to swing against desegregation in 1974 by forbidding the integration of urban and suburban school districts in Detroit, it satisfied northern families and thereby ended a drive for a constitutional amendment to stop school busing. By the 1990s, the court began to allow school districts to terminate desegregation plans.