Race and Education: An Interview With Professor Raymond Wolters

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VDARE.COM’s Kevin Lamb recently interviewed Professor Wolters.

Lamb: What is your academic background? How did you become interested in the issues surrounding the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions on race, desegregation and education policy?

Wolters: I was educated at Stanford (B.A., 1960) and Berkeley (Ph.D., 1967) and have been a member of the faculty at the University of Delaware since 1965.

My special interest in school desegregation came about by chance.

In 1978-79 the federal courts ordered my county, New Castle County, DE, to implement one of the most wide-ranging of all of the plans of busing for racial balance. At that time, 90 percent of the students in Delaware’s biggest city, Wilmington, were black, and on standard tests the high school seniors in Wilmington were scoring at about the level of 8th grade students in the suburbs, where students were 90 percent white. The hope was that this “racial-achievement gap” would be reduced if students were bused so that the enrollment at each school in the county was about 80 percent white.

On May 17, 1954, the date of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had decided five cases that presented a similar issue—not only the Brown case from Topeka, KS, but also cases from Wilmington, DE, Summerton, SC, Prince Edward County, VA, and Washington, D.C. As it happened, Wilmington had desegregated its schools immediately after Brown, but between 1954 and 1975 the racial balance in Wilmington’s public schools “tipped” from 73 percent white to only 9 percent white.

That led me to question the view that seemed to prevail in most books and articles. Most writers depicted desegregation as a great success, but the policy had not worked well in Wilmington. I wondered if the policy had also failed in the other places whose cases were decided on May 17, 1954.

Source:
Race and Education: An Interview With Professor Raymond Wolters
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