The Failure of Freedom of Choice: Decision-Making in a Southern Black Community

The present study was designed to answer the question: Why, under Freedom of Choice plans of school integration did so few black parents make an integration decision, and continue to enroll their children in segregated, black public schools? A number of variables are proposed, tested, then interrelated in a model, which is tested and modified. Some comments are addressed to the limitations of the study, and the feasibility of a general decision-making model. Back in May of 1954, the United States Supreme Court culminated a series of earlier decisions concerning racial segregation and discrimination by declaring segregation in public education to be "a denial of the equal protection of the law."1 One year later, implementa* The research upon which this paper is based was carried out with the aid of Grant OEG-8000043-1804 (010) from the U.S. Office of Education. An earlier draft of the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, in Washington, D.C., on August 30-31, 1970. I am indebted to Bruce W. Aldrich, Hubert M. Blalock, M. Richard Cramer, Bruce K. Eckland, and James A. Wiggins for comments on an earlier draft. 1 Although Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is often cited as the desegregation decision, it may be perceived more accurately as a historical watershed; the culmination of decisions in the area of educational desegregation such as Pearson v. Murray (1936), Missouri ex. rel. Gaines vs. Canada (1938), Sipuel vs. Oklahoma Board of ReThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Sun, 20 Nov 2016 04:22:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 488 / SOCIAL FORCES / vol. 50, june 1972 tion of the 1954 decision was delegated to the lower courts, "to take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases" (Blaustein and Ferguson, 1962:172). One latent consequence of these decrees was the institutionalization, by state law and/or practice, of avoidance, evasion, and delaying tactics manifestly designed to hinder implementation of the 1954 decision, especially in the South.9 By the mid-1960s, the legal attempts to avoid desegregation consequencesthose attempts at interposition and nullification, as well as those of disqualification, the separation of schools on criteria other than race,3 and the creation of private public schoolshad proven to be very costly, unsatisfactory and unsuccessful (Blaustein and Ferguson, 1962:242-267). The various Freedom of Choice (also called Freedom of Transfer or Free-Choice) plans, although differing as to mechanics, continued to be employed by some school districts into the 1970s. The value of the Freedom of Choice plans, for many of their proponents, lay in the fact that black people living in the Free-Choice-opting school districts seem to have chosen not to enroll (or transfer) their children (to or) in the formerly white segregated schools in large numbers. The present study was designed to answer the question: Why, under these Freedom of Choice plans of integration, did so few black parents make an integration decision, and continue to enroll children in segregated black schools? We approached the problem by examining two groups, integrators and non-integrators, to determine if there were certain factors that could aid us in differentiating between them. Those factors discovered which favored the probability that a person would choose to be an integrator rather than a non-integrator were then related to each other in the construction of a model depicting these interrelationships. The testing of the model permitted its modification so as to obtain a closer conformity with the reality described by our data. It was also felt that if commonalities among the integrators could be determined, which did not exist within the group of non-integrators, those commonalities might then be generalizable to other situations involving black decision-making, e.g., questions involving the participation/ non-participation in other institutional areas of American life still forbidden to or rejected by black people.