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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 6.73 KB Ansley T. Erickson. Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. (Historical Studies of Urban America.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 390. $40.00. Raymond Wolters Am Hist Rev (2017) 122 (1): 210-211. Published: 31 January 2017 These days most books on social policy are "argument" books. Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits is a case in point. Ansley T. Erickson deserves high praise for the depth of her research. But this reviewer demurs when it comes to her argument. Erickson's book deals with school desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee. However, there are only passing references to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decisions of 1954 and 1955 or to numerous Supreme Court holdings during the next decade, all of which were based on the principle that the Constitution forbade racial discrimination by the government but did not require integration. This consensus was summed up in the Civil Rights Act of 1964: "'Desegregation' means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but 'desegregation' shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance" (Title IV, Section 401b.). Erickson takes exception to this definition and instead makes a case for what she calls "statistical desegregation"—that is, assigning students by race to create enrollments that correspond with the overall population ratios of large metropolitan areas. This sort of desegregation was achieved (for a while) after the Supreme Court, in a series of cases between 1968 and 1973, redefined the meaning of desegregation and required that students be assigned by race to achieve racially balanced school enrollments. Erickson favors this policy but acknowledges that court-ordered busing for racial balance did not efface substantial disparities in the average academic achievement of blacks and whites. By 1971, Nashville-Davidson County had complied with the mandate of Brown. Students were no longer assigned on the basis of race. Instead, they were assigned, regardless of race, to the nearest neighborhood schools. This, however, led to a situation where different schools had different proportions of black and white students. According to Erickson, this imbalance was not entirely the result of geography, individual choices, or economic wherewithal. It was also influenced by state and local government policies with respect to highways, housing, and low-interest loans. By constructing highways, the state facilitated the flight of whites to the suburbs. Government-regulated banks also fostered racial separation by giving low-interest loans only to people who were deemed creditworthy. And local governments situated most of their public housing in predominantly black areas. Erickson mentions that residents in the projects initially found themselves in improved circumstances. Nevertheless, she maintains that government policies contributed to a racially imbalanced pattern of settlement, and she argues that court-ordered busing was justified as a remedy for policies that affected blacks and whites differently. Essentially, Erickson makes a case for what constitutional lawyers once called "the Keyes presumption," a presumption that the Supreme Court established in a 1973 case that involved Denver, Colorado. This presumption held that if a government policy limited racial interaction to even a slight extent, then any racial imbalance that existed elsewhere in a jurisdiction was not adventitious. At the time, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. expressed profound misgivings over this idea, and eventually (in the 1990s and in 2007) the Supreme Court rejected the Keyes presumption. In the meantime, however, schools in metropolitan Nashville (and many other places) were required to have racially balanced enrollments. A court order of 1971 required each Nashville school to have an enrollment that was 15 to 35 percent black and 65 to 85 percent white. After this policy touched off white flight, additional court orders in 1980 and 1983 extended the desegregation area to all of Davidson County. As a result, Nashville achieved a degree of statistical desegregation that was unmatched by most American school districts. Nevertheless, Erickson writes, "Nashville gave up on desegregation" when the Supreme Court's decisions of the 1990s allowed a return to neighborhood schools (293–294). "After decades of out-desegregating most American school systems, Nashville moved much closer to the segregated mean" (295). Nashville-Davidson County returned to racially imbalanced neighborhood schools for elementary students, and to large, comprehensive high schools where there were racially disproportionate enrollments in both advanced academic studies and vocational education. Erickson laments this turn away from court-ordered, racially balanced integration. She notes that the test scores of black students improved during the 1970s