Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism (review)

In the history of American public policy is there a topic more disheartening than public school desegregation? More than a half century after the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the typical black or Hispanic student in American cities attended a school that was about 20% white and 80% minority.¹ On Brown's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, the public school student body in Baltimore, Maryland, was 89 per cent black. How did this happen?

The usual story emphasizes the influence of demographic change, federal urban policy, venal blockbusters, deindustrialization, and the politics of race and class. In his powerful account of the abject failure of desegregation in the schools of Baltimore, Howell S. Baum, professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, does not deny the importance of any of these factors. His history includes all of them. But he digs deeper. Underlying the usual culprits, Baum finds American liberalism with its fixation on individual freedom and preference for markets over governments. Baum explains how liberalism's "individualistic prism" (208), which obscured race, led to a desegregation plan that worsened the condition it was designed to remedy. Even so, desegregation, he emphasizes, might have had a shot at working were it not for contingencies that undermined its slim chances of success.

Baum's account rests on a thorough canvas of primary sources, including valuable interviews with key participants in the events. It is impossible to imagine he left any potential source unexamined. At times, the detail with which Baum tells the story of school desegregation feels overwhelming. But the narrative arc and main point always remain clear, and the details lend authority to his judgements. Baum's book joins exceptional scholarship with keen political insight and a moral sensibility which never loses track of what is at stake.

Desegregation and integration, Baum emphasizes, are not the same things. Desegregation was accomplished by repealing the ordinances that mandated separate schools for whites and blacks. By the time of Brown in 1954, white residents in Baltimore generally were ready to accept desegregation, and Baltimore ended desegregation quickly and easily. Integration refers to white and black children attending school together, which is another matter. It is with integration that Baltimore failed. To resolve the contradiction between embracing desegregation and resisting integration Baltimoreans drew on the individualistic core of American liberalism. "Liberalism made it seem only reasonable to think of children as raceless individuals—even when the issue was racial to the core" (xi). As a result, public officials "made segregation voluntary, refusing to control enrollment, letting individual students decide where to attend school, and remaining officially indifferent to whatever racial makeup resulted." Remarkably, African-Americans agreed with a desegregation plan based on freedom of choice. "Black community leaders encouraged and supported this approach." The result was an educational and civic disaster. "In the end, unregulated family choice of schools, compounded by white withdrawal from public schools, produced only modest, temporary desegregation, followed by resegregation and the steady growth of a black student majority" (xi).

Reflecting American liberalism's preference for markets over governments, the school board created an "enrollment market" regulated by "voluntary mutual accommodation rather than government coercion" (210). "Market principles" unfortunately foreclosed the path to integration in two ways. "First, markets poorly fit the conditions through which education is 'produced' and 'consumed,' and, centrally, markets cannot force individuals to make choices they strongly dislike" (210). Baum's account should provide today's vociferous champions of "school choice" with a sobering warning.

Freedom of choice proved a disastrous desegregation policy because it destabilized parental expectations. By removing "central control," free choice created "uncertainty about school makeup" and by adding to anxiety "frightened away white families" (147). Baum, however, does not share the common belief that aggressive school integration caused "white flight." White families fled Baltimore's schools "even when their children had few black classmates." In 1972, "two-thirds of white students attended schools...