It has been 72 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. While there has been some success in integrating schools across the South through enforcement mechanisms such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which gave the federal government the authority to withhold funding from schools that did not comply, progress in much of the country has actually reversed since 1974. That’s when the Milliken v. Bradley ruling declared cross-district busing could not be mandated by the courts unless a specific district had shown intentional racial discrimination.

The root of segregation between school districts across the United States can largely be traced to a long history of discriminatory zoning practices by federal, state, local, and private authorities. Racially restrictive covenants that prohibited people of color from buying or leasing land in particular areas were not ruled completely illegal until the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, and mortgage redlining by the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs channeled loans toward white suburbs while denying them to black families until the 1960s.