ABSTRACT
I n the spring of 1975, James Coleman released the “preliminary results” of a new study concluding that school desegregation contributed to “white flight” from big cities and was fostering resegregation of urban districts. On the basis of his findings, Coleman maintained that whites were leaving both large and middle-sized cities with high proportions of blacks, and specifically that whites in big cities were fleeing integration, while whites in middle-sized cities were “not moving any faster from rapidly integrating cities than from others.” In short, according to Coleman, “the flight from integration appears to be principally a large-city phenomenon.” In the most controversial passage of his study, Coleman argued:
The extremely strong reactions of individual whites in moving their children out of large districts engaged in massive and rapid desegregation suggest that in the long run the policies that have been pursued will defeat the purpose of increasing overall contact among races in schools…. Thus a major policy implication of this analysis is that in an area such as school desegregation, which has important consequences for individuals and in which individuals retain control of some actions that can in the end defeat the policy, the courts are probably the worst instrument of social policy.
Coleman’s study provoked bitter attacks from proponents of activist desegregation policies, such as Roy Wilkins and Kenneth Clark, not only because his findings were inimical to their cause, but because his “defection” seemed especially traitorous. After all, he had been the principal author of the Equal Educational Opportunity Survey (known as the Coleman Report), which had been authorized by Congress as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and had served, since its publication in 1966, as the chief evidence of the beneficial effects of school desegregation. Coleman had also taken an outspoken public role as a leading scholarly advocate of school desegregation.