Our Segregated Capital: An Increasingly Diverse City with Racially Polarized Schools

Washington was one of the first districts ordered to desegregate by the Supreme Court in l954 when segregation by law was ruled unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The DC plan that was implemented was not busing or other mandatory desegregation but neighborhood schools, and the city had almost completely resegregated before the busing issue arose elsewhere in the l970s. For decades the city became more and more African American and the school system had only a handful of white students.
Since 1980, however, the white population of Washington has climbed considerably, and the black population has dropped sharply because of the exodus of the black middle class, so there no longer is a black majority in DC. From 1980 to 2010 the city’s black population fell 31% while the white population grew 35% and the Latino population soared 210% from a small base. Shortly afterwards the city reached a non-black majority for the first time in more than a half century.