Just gonna put this here even though probably nobody on this thread needs to be told again:
A 2014 study conducted by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found desegregation’s impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier.Notably, Rucker also found that black progress did not come at the expense of white Americans—white students in integrated schools did just as well academically as those in segregated schools. Other studies have found that attending integrated schools made white students more likely to later live in integrated neighborhoods and send their own children to racially diverse schools.
Melissa Dent attended her first integrated class as a middle-schooler, in 1980, as a result of the court order. But by the time she graduated from Central eight years later, integration in the South had already reached its high-water mark. The percentage of black and white students attending school together would never be greater.
At Central, Dent quickly made a name for herself as a premier athlete. Her track team took the state title twice, and she was named Alabama’s top female high-school track performer in 1987. More important, the school introduced her to people from different backgrounds. Neither her mother nor her father had gone to college, yet her classmates—some of whose fathers were attorneys or business owners—planted that seed. “All my friends were talking about college and wanting to do better,” she told me. “I’ve always been ambitious, and I wanted to do better too.”
As part of the first generation born outside the constraints of Jim Crow, Dent has not lived out a Horatio Alger Jr. fable. Much like the story of integration, her story is one of fits and starts, of grinding progress and battles to hang on to the gains. In her sophomore year of college, she got pregnant. She came back home and had her baby. But she then returned to school, walking onto the track team at the University of Alabama and graduating in 1995.
Now 45 and a single mother of four, she works on the assembly line at the Mercedes-Benz plant just outside of town. Her work is physically taxing, but she fought to get the factory gig, a coveted job in the area, because it paid more than she’d ever earned as a teaching assistant, the job she had after college. Unlike her father, she owns her West End home, a brick fixer-upper she bought eight years ago, after falling in love with its den and big backyard.
Dent called herself “average, very average,” as a student, but like her own parents, she hopes that education will take her children further than it has taken her.
Her children’s academic medals and certificates clutter the living-room walls in her house. It is clear in conversation that Melissa never expected to count the opportunity for a quality education among the things she would be unable to provide for her children. She said she’d assumed that she’d be the bridge between her father’s Jim Crow generation and a new generation for whom integration was natural.
Dent said her high-school class had formed a lasting bond. Even now, she said, if she called on any of her white fellow alums, like the prominent lawyer she’d reconnected with during a recent class reunion, they would remember her. She believes D’Leisha, a child every bit as outgoing as her mother is reserved, would have formed a rainbow coalition of friends if she’d attended the old Central, and made connections that could have helped her in the future.
She glanced at D’Leisha. “My girls are not experiencing that.”