Bearing the Brunt: The Growth of School Suspension and Resistance to Desegregation

Abstract Suspending children out of school is ineffective, harmful, and racially inequitable. Why, then, are millions of children suspended from schools every year? The practice of suspending children out of school, first highlighted on the national stage by the groundbreaking Children’s Defense Fund report, became common as a way to maintain racial oppression in the face of civil rights progress. As schools across the U.S. slowly responded to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by desegregating, they turned toward exclusionary punishment. In this article I summarize the results of archival research on a case study of Boston public schools as they desegregated in 1974. As I show, and as the Children’s Defense Fund argued at that time, Boston schools responded to the unwanted presence of Black children in previously all white schools by suspending them at high rates. School suspensions were rare before desegregation in Boston and elsewhere; removing children from schools emerged as a common strategy because of resistance to school desegregation among many white parents, politicians, and educators. The problems identified by the Children’s Defense Fund report in 1975 were thus a consequence of a broader system of racial oppression that continues to harm students today.