Comparing Remedies for School Desegregation and Employment Discrimination: Can Employers Now Help Schools?

Abstract

Ten years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While discrimination in the workplace has not disappeared in the forty years since Title VII's enactment, one sees minorities and women in a greater variety of jobs, and at higher levels, than one would have seen a generation ago.

The promise of Brown, however, has not been achieved. When one looks at public schools fifty years after Brown, a great number are still racially segregated, and those whose populations are composed primarily of minorities are often impoverished. Both Brown and Title VII identified the right to be free from discrimination, but that right was not self-implementing. Eliminating discrimination required, and requires, effective remedies.

This Article compares and contrasts the lack of success in desegregating the schools with the greater success in eliminating discrimination from the workplace and suggests that the workplace and schoolhouse can act together for the benefit of both. Part II theorizes that Brown might, in hindsight, have been more successfully implemented and demonstrates why what might have been done earlier probably would not work today. Part III compares the plight of students who have not been helped by Brown with the plight of working parents whose family demands have kept them from sharing fully in the promise of Title VII. It suggests, given the greater success of racial integration in the workplace than in the schoolhouse, that the workplace and schoolhouse might work together to benefit both.

Keywords: Brown v. Bd. of Education, Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964, continued racial segregation in schools, discrimination, public schools, effective remedies, parental demands, workplace, schoolhouse