Early Avenues of the Afterlife : Antiblackness in K–12 School Discipline Post- Brown

Abstract

The disproportionate discipline of Black students remains a civil rights issue. While researchers often focus on contemporary aspects of this issue, its origins extend to earlier historical eras. Using the concept of the afterlife of school segregation, this article presents themes derived from a review of key historical reports published during the early 1970s about the use of school discipline during large-scale school desegregation. Doing so illuminates the historical patterns of pushout that followed the Brown decision. Four themes were identified, including: (1) widespread disproportionate suspension and expulsion of Black students, (2) changes to conduct codes in previously all-white schools to target Black students culturally and to enforce segregationist norms, (3) the frequent use of discipline to suppress Black students’ efforts to challenge racial injustice, and (4) white educators’ use of discretion to enact disparate discipline. These themes showcase the afterlife of school segregation in the proliferation of exclusionary discipline post-Brown and connect to continued sources of disparities today. Recommendations for ending anti-Black discipline are included.

Keywords

conceptual analysis history desegregation disparities Black students school discipline policy

Introduction

In 1958, The Crisis magazine¹ relayed the harrowing story of Minnijean Brown-Trickey. At 16 years old, Minnijean was one of nine Black students that desegregated Little Rock Central High, in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the governor’s fierce and militant resistance (Bell, 2004). During that year, white students targeted Minnijean with physical and verbal abuse. In response, white school officials suspended and ultimately expelled Minnijean, who was forced to complete her schooling up North. Minnijean was the first of the Little Rock Nine to be suspended, each of whom was subjected to abuse from white students. Instead of protecting Black students, white school administrators responded to these incidents by issuing disciplinary sanctions against them. As writers of the Crisis observed, “If you were a Black student at Central High School, you [were] automatically marked for mischief” (1958, p. 271). In the process of Little Rock’s desegregation, school discipline served as an avenue of pushout. Yet, what happened to Minnijean in Little Rock represented a larger trend and reflects a story that occurred throughout the nation as adherence to desegregation increased (Chin, 2021; Edelman et al., 1975).

During a historic moment in which the nation’s schools had a mandate to expand educational opportunity for Black students, early desegregation was implemented alongside specific forms of exclusionary school discipline. This history takes center stage in this conceptual analysis, in which I use the theoretical lens of the afterlife of school segregation (ross, 2020) to provide insights into forms of disciplinary pushout that existed within desegregating schools. To do so, I review archival reports compiled during the early 1970s by civil rights organizations that were monitoring an increasing number of districts that, nearly two decades after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), were finally implementing desegregation. Using examples from these reports, I illustrate avenues of school pushout that undermined educational opportunity for Black students in previously all-white schools. From this review, several themes are identified, including: (1) the broad and large-scale disproportionate use of suspension and expulsion against Black students, (2) changes to conduct codes to culturally target Black students and enforce segregationist norms, (3) the frequent use of discipline to suppress Black students’ efforts to challenge and change racially hostile conditions, and (4) white educators’ use of autonomy and discretion to enact racially disparate discipline. Together, this assemblage of exclusionary school discipline processes constituted early avenues of the afterlife of school segregation within desegregating schools, echoing those that exist today.

Exclusionary School Discipline and Antiblackness

Exclusionary school discipline, which includes suspensions, expulsions, and law enforcement referrals and arrests, is a pervasive issue in public schools. During the 2017–2018 school year alone, approximately 5 million students were suspended² at least once, and more than 100,000 were expelled (U.S. Department of Education, 2017–2018). Exclusionary school discipline results in students missing millions of instructional days annually and contributes to lowered academic achievement, high school drop-out, and contact with the juvenile justice system (Losen & Martinez, 2020; Welsh & Little, 2018). Black students disproportionately bear the brunt of exclusionary discipline. Discipline rates for Black students can range from 2–15 times that of white students and are evident across multiple categories of punishment and across multiple disparity measures (Darling-Hammond & Ho, 2024). Black students who hold multiple marginalized identities, including Black students with disabilities and LGBTQ+ students, are particularly vulnerable to high rates of discipline (Leung-Gagné et al., 2022; Ksinan et al., 2019; Welsh & Little, 2018). The overwhelming evidence has led some to conclude that “no matter how you slice it, Black students are punished more” (Darling-Hammond & Ho, 2024, p. 1).

These patterns are not explained by differential behavior on the part of Black students but rather differential selection and the application of harsher penalties for minor and typical adolescent behavior (Fisher et al., 2022; Huang, 2018, 2020; Skiba et al., 2011). In fact, social psychology finds that anti-Black bias operates on two levels. First, on the classroom level, teachers are more likely to issue disciplinary referrals to Black students even for behavior identical to that of their white peers, and second, on the organizational level, schools with larger proportions of Black students are more likely to use harsh punishment and to implement zero-tolerance policies (Owens, 2022, 2023; Welch & Payne, 2010). These dual processes span teachers and organizational climates that result in increased punishment for Black students. More broadly, because exclusionary discipline adversely impacts students, and because Black students incur discipline at higher rates than their white peers, these disparities contribute to both the racial opportunity gap between Black and white students and broader economic and political inequalities between Black and white Americans (Conwell, 2016; Gregory et al., 2010).

Historical Origins of Anti-Black School Discipline

Today’s anti-Black discipline is undergirded by a much longer history of anti-Black educational laws put in place by slavery’s justifiers between the 17th and 19th centuries and that rendered the teaching of reading and writing to enslaved peoples punishable by death (George, 2023; Givens, 2021). These laws, which operated as the slave codes pre–Civil War and as the Black codes during Reconstruction, sought to assert white dominance by undermining Black educational, economic, and political advancement (Coles & Powell, 2020; Du Bois, 1935; Dumas & ross, 2016; Ewing, 2025; George, 2023; Givens, 2025; ross, 2020). These early educational laws formed a backdrop of legislation that rendered the pursuit of educational opportunity for Black people an offense punishable not just by disciplinary means but by death.

The relationship between education and punishment remained in later eras, where, during the Great Migration, as Black families fled north from white supremacy’s Southern violence, education laws, social welfare organizations, and a burgeoning juvenile justice system converged to criminalize Black children (Agyepong, 2018; Wilkerson, 2010). As new Black migrants from the South resettled, discrimination against Black children and denial of economic and political resources for Black families increased the likelihood that Black children would be targeted by enforcement of truancy laws and castigated as “delinquents” (Agyepong, 2018). As the juvenile courts expanded, sanctions subjected Black youth to harsher penalties, including detention, corporal punishment, convict leasing, and even execution (Ward, 2012).

In addition to these developments that interlinked educational laws and punishment during the early 20th century, by the 1950s, the first wave of zero-tolerance discipline policies was taking hold of large urban districts (Kafka, 2011). By the 1990s, the contemporary zero-tolerance movement increased the adoption of zero tolerance across all states in compliance with federal law and funding, leading to harsher penalties for even minor misconduct and increasing suspension and expulsion of Black students (Irby & Coney, 2021). Thus, from the earliest anti-Black laws passed in the slave-holding colonies to recent changes in federal policy, punishment has functioned to undermine educational advancement for Black Americans across generations and has been intertwined with education systems (Conwell, 2016; Stern, 2023).

Exclusionary discipline is thus part of a longer racial timeline interconnected with American education laws and part of broader development of the “carceral state” spanning multiple institutions and systems and born from a foundation of antiblackness and white supremacy (Diamond, 2024; Diamond & Gomez, 2023; Dumas & ross, 2016; George, 2023; Stern, 2023; Williams, 2024). Importantly, punishment has not just evolved as a blanket form of oppression but has functioned in white response to Black Americans’ exercising of civil rights and self-determination (Sojoyner, 2013). The adverse impacts of disciplinary punishment have dispossessed Black Americans of educational and later economic and political enfranchisement, while functioning to advantage whites, thus rendering education as primarily a “white good” (Donnor, 2013; Justice, 2023). At the same time, historically Black institutions fought against societal oppression by forging deeply educative contexts for the development and advancement of Black Americans in “fugitive spaces” (Givens, 2021; ross, 2020; Walker, 2000).

In the historical landscape of exclusionary discipline, there remain opportunities to better understand what occurred during school desegregation. Rather than a smooth transition to racial “integration,” following the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, much of the South actively opposed school desegregation using political and legislative means (Klarman, 2006; G. Lewis, 2006; McRae, 2018). Often referred to as “Massive Resistance,” this era was characterized by white governors, legislators, education officials, and parents fiercely and violently resisting school desegregation. In acts reflecting commitments to upholding racial segregation and entrenched anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016), white officials leveraged constitutional amendments and legislation authorizing opposition to school desegregation by providing governors and school districts the authority to close public school systems and to use pupil placement policies that undermined integration (Klarman, 2006).

Numerous quantitative accounts have found that racial disparities in discipline between Black and white students grew during desegregation (Chin, 2021). Specifically, Black students were 6.3 percent more likely to be suspended after desegregation than before, and White students were 3 percent more likely (Chin, 2021). And a growing body of literature implicates school authorities as a mechanism of harsh punishment against Black students in desegregating schools. In the early 1960s, southern local school boards were granted the authority to establish school discipline rules and regulations, thus concentrating the power to discipline specifically among the board and superintendent (Hale & Livingston, 2023). Hale and Livingston (2023) and Kautz (2023) highlight several historical incidents where superintendents and school boards passed punitive policies and enlisted law enforcement to suppress Black students’ protests in desegregating districts. These and other instances show how white political and education officials leveraged suspension and expulsion to resist the integration of Black students (ACHR, 1972; Hale & Livingston, 2023; Kautz, 2023; Kupchik, 2025).

These important, place-bound histories help us understand the role of policy and power at the intersections of desegregation and anti-Black disciplinary pushout. Yet opportunities remain for further exploring these processes, and particularly the role of school authorities, in other cases of exclusionary discipline and school desegregation. With this in mind, I sought to identify processes that unfolded inside of desegregating schools that might mirror or build on those provided in other accounts, processes that would help explain school authorities’ use of discipline against Black students such as Minnijean and countless others in previously all-white schools. Particularly, I was interested in (1) trends and patterns in suspensions and expulsions by race, (2) rationales provided by school officials for the use of discipline, and (3) changes to school discipline policy. Before explaining how I undertook this inquiry, I introduce a framework for making sense of these patterns.

Theoretical Framework: The Afterlife of School Segregation

To examine issues of race, school discipline, and desegregation, I drew upon a theoretical framework—defined as a set of ideas through which to understand a given phenomenon (Tisdell et al., 2025)—called the afterlife of school segregation (ross, 2020). I selected this theory because it accounts for the longer legacy of anti-Black discipline and its historical connections to white supremacy and slavery and uplifts the resistance and self-determination among Black Americans in pursuit of educational opportunity. ross (2020)³ describes the afterlife of school segregation as a concept that “centers the ways in which despite the end of legal segregation of schooling, Black students remain[ed] systematically dehumanized and positioned as uneducable” (p. 48). Despite the end of formal Jim Crow, the afterlife of school segregation retains educational processes that sort, undermine, and stymy educational opportunity for Black students.

Ross’s afterlife of school segregation is used to conceptualize the mechanism of racialized exclusion that occurs in school discipline processes (Coles & Powell, 2020; Dumas & ross, 2016; ross, 2020). Ross’s concept originates within the tradition known as Black critical theory, a theory that “confronts the specificity of anti-blackness” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 417). Anti-Black racism consists of everyday policies and practices that “find their logic in, and [that] reproduce, Black suffering” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 429). Anti-Black racism is “central to how all of us make sense of the social, economic, historical, and cultural dimensions of human life” (Dumas & ross, 2016, p. 429). Through this framework, exclusionary discipline is rendered as a specific form of anti-Black racism and antiblackness in schools (Coles & Powell, 2020; Dumas & ross, 2016; ross, 2020). Exclusionary school discipline operates as “an inherently anti-Black policy that removes and excludes Black youth from school, cornering them into unproductive pathways” (Coles & Powell, 2020, p. 114).

The intellectual lineage of ross’s afterlife of school segregation extends further to Saidiya Hartman’s conceptualization of the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 1997). In this work, Hartman contends that a throughline of racial domination between the antebellum and postbellum eras, with even liberal reforms, ideologically focused on individualism, will, and responsibility serving as a conduit to ongoing racial violence and oppression. Yet at the same time, Hartman emphasized the possibilities of resistance, pleasure, and redress in everyday moments that defied oppressive contexts and reasserted agency. Consistent with the thematic throughline of racial subjugation, in ross’s concept of the afterlife of school segregation, the pervasiveness of anti-Black school discipline reflects that “while Black students are no longer subjected to a system of formally segregated schooling, the notion of de facto integration (let alone a liberatory educational experience), remains unrealized” (ross, 2020, p. 49).

The concept is rooted in “a more specific rendering of Hartman’s (2008) afterlife of slavery” (ross, 2020, p. 49) and invokes the historical throughline connecting the disciplining and punishment of Black children “from chattel slavery to The New Jim Crow” (Coles & Powell, 2020, p. 113). In present times, ross describes the afterlife of school segregation as one that looks like “Black student referrals, suspensions, expulsions, kick outs, and pushouts to prison, from toddlers to tweens . . . it looks like searches and seizures, police dogs and metal detectors, backs against lockers” (ross, 2020, p. 50). ross (2020) and Coles and Powell (2020) help us understand the experiences of Black youth under contemporary conditions of punishment and see what the afterlife looks like today.

This conception does not fixate on racial oppression but includes a critical recognition of resistance, fugitive spaces, and joy. As Hartman couples her account with a recognition of simultaneous resistance, resilience, and possibility, ross’s conception of the afterlife is linked to the necessity of fugitive spaces, Black educational spaces existing outside of the white gaze, “born, created, and in direct response to the rampant antiblackness in the larger world” (ross, 2020, p. 51). Such all-Black spaces have long been imbued with the pedagogical excellence and nurturance of Black teachers throughout history (Givens, 2021; Walker, 2000). In these “homeplaces,” “Black folks could reimagine blackness and develop healthy Black subjectivities” to sustain resistance against an anti-Black world (hooks, 1990; ross, 2020, p. 52).

Whereas ross helps us see the afterlife of segregation in contemporary school discipline, in this article, I walk readers through an examination of earlier avenues of this afterlife, concretizing what the afterlife looked like within early desegregating schools. As we will see, though the pathways of racialized exclusion existed long before desegregation began, the ways it reared its head inside desegregating schools took an assemblage of particular forms related to segregationist norms and school officials. Explicating these forms clarifies avenues of the early afterlife of school segregation and deepens the historical bridge between past and present.

Analytic Method

With the goal of better understanding early avenues of the afterlife, I undertook a review of prominent historical reports produced during the 1970s, a time period that saw the greatest progress on school desegregation across the nation (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Despite the Brown decision outlawing school segregation in 1954, by 1964, only 20% of Southern Black students attended a desegregated school (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). By 1970, however, active federal enforcement had resulted in substantial desegregation and nearly 40% of Black students in the South were in mixed-race (Black/white) schools (Orfield & Eaton, 1996; Orfield et al., 2014). Consequently, examining archival data from this time provides unique insights into what occurred within newly desegregating districts and schools. The archival reports selected for this analysis were those that contained eye-witness accounts collected as part of site visits by civil rights advocates operating in various formal and informal capacities as “desegregation monitors.”

These monitors visited hundreds of desegregating schools across the United States to provide oversight of desegregation processes. During these site visits, monitors often surveyed and interviewed school staff and students and collected quantitative data on student outcomes, including school discipline data. The following four reports were included in my review: The Status of School Desegregation in the South, published in 1970 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), in which desegregation monitors went to over 400 desegregating districts during desegregation. The AFSC is a Quaker organization founded in 1917 and connected to earlier instantiations of Friends’ associations. It has a long history of involvement in the abolition movement and early Black education. During school desegregation, the AFSC partnered with other civil rights organizations to investigate the implementation of school desegregation in the South and reported on the conditions of desegregation for both Black children and educators (AFSC, 1970; Fenwick, 2022).

A second report, It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in Forty-Three Southern Cities Eighteen Years After Brown, was published by the Alabama Council on Human Relations in 1972, an organization that worked closely with the AFSC and other allied groups to monitor desegregation. A third report titled The Student Pushout: Victim of Continued Resistance to Desegregation was produced by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Fund and published in 1973. Included in the report were data pertaining to out-of-school suspension and expulsion and racial disparities in select states and districts. The fourth report, Children Out of School, was produced by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) and published in 1974. The CDF emerged from the earlier Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm founded by civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman and active in desegregation monitoring activities (CDF, 2022). The CDF report addressed systemic barriers to school attendance imposed by poverty and discrimination, special education segregation, and disciplinary pushout in select Southern cities. Across these data sources, reports contained vivid qualitative descriptions, survey trends, and tabulations of suspensions and expulsions.

I uploaded each report as a PDF and coded parts of each pertaining to school discipline, including when school discipline was mentioned as a topic and any accompanying qualitative and quantitative data. Because I wanted to identify (1) trends and patterns in suspensions and expulsions by race, (2) rationales provided by school officials for the use of discipline, (3) changes to school discipline policy, and (4) these three areas served as the primary code categories. Coding these topics resulted in a set of information related to the kinds of disciplinary tools used by school administrators (e.g., suspensions, expulsions), the prevalence and racialized aspects of discipline disparities, the rationales school administrators provided for disciplinary decisions, and sometimes information about district and school policies. Coding and retrieving information in this way reflects the process of “structural coding” as explained by Saldaña (2013), in which researchers “identify large segments of text on broad topics” (p. 86). I then generated memos on each of the topics to create thematic narratives, presented in the findings section. After reviewing and developing written memos from the coded segments, I used the main ideas of the framework to make sense of the lower-inference descriptive patterns. Because these reports were collected from a limited number of desegregating schools and during a brief window in time, the patterns described cannot be said to extend to all desegregating schools. Even patterns within the reports varied, and I attempt to speak to that variation.

Overall, themes indicated the common use of suspension and expulsion in many, but not all, previously all-white schools and districts, and the disproportionate impact of exclusionary discipline across Black students. While these patterns are not novel (Chin, 2021), they provide a foundation for understanding the next finding: processes that helped explain these trends, including changes to district and school conduct codes, segregationists’ rationalizations, and loosely coupled processes used by school officials to enact harsh punishment. More than just a technical response, the afterlife framework suggests that in some desegregating schools, school discipline provided a means for segregationists to reassert second-class citizenship upon Black students. At the same time, Black students exerted agency and resilience in the face of hostility and discrimination. Because these data provide insights into the intersection of anti-Black school discipline during a time of active school desegregation, these patterns deepen the historical chronology underlying ross’s conception of the afterlife of school segregation.

Findings: Early Avenues of the Afterlife

Reviewing these reports made four themes evident, including the broad and large-scale disproportionate use of suspension and expulsion of Black students and simultaneous changes to conduct codes to enforce segregationist norms. In addition, patterns showed the use of discretion among white school officials, which arguably provided the local latitude to levy suspensions and expulsions disproportionately for minor offenses. The authority vested in local white education officials appeared to permit discriminatory processes with little intervention. Within these hostile conditions, education officials often disciplined Black students for protesting racism in schools. Finally, civil rights organizations and scholars at the time sought to use information collected in these reports to sound the warning cry of racialized school discipline in desegregating contexts.

Tools of Punishment: Suspension, Expulsion, and Law Enforcement

One of the most evident themes was the use of suspension and expulsion in desegregating schools and districts. At the time, desegregation monitors had to compile numbers through locally administered surveys or school records and were only able to conduct analyses using data from the Office for Civil Rights when reporting on suspensions and race became available in the 1972–1973 school year. The earliest reports reviewed here illuminate examples of what disproportionate discipline looked like in the late 1960s, prior to the national collection of suspension data by race. In Little Rock, Arkansas, where Minnijean Brown was suspended, over 1,000 out-of-school suspensions were issued during the 1968 school year, approximately a decade after desegregation began. Sixty-two percent of those suspended were Black students, at a time when Black students were only 30% of Little Rock’s enrollment (ACHR, 1972).

Monitors identified suspensions as a “major problem area” in other desegregating districts. In New Orleans, the city known for the desegregation crisis of 1960 and the story of Ruby Bridges, the first African American student to integrate into an all-white elementary school in the South, Black students were suspended en masse as desegregation increased. New Orleans had an estimated 4,600 suspensions during the first four months of the 1971–72 school year, with estimates that 80% of suspended students were Black students. In Louisiana on the whole, the SRC found that “thousands of students are being suspended or expelled each year, many of them [suspended] twice, or even up to six times, in a single year” (1973, p. 36). In some cases, suspended Black students were then placed into alternative schools and thus moved out of general educational access. This was documented in Little Rock, Arkansas; Savannah, Georgia; and Mobile, Alabama, with, at the time, forthcoming plans to utilize alternative schools as part of desegregation plans in Norfolk, St. Petersburg, and Columbia (ACHR, 1972). Reports stated that students enrolled in these alternative schools were disproportionately Black (ACHR, 1972, p. 98). It was speculated by some school officials that alternative schools would become “a dumping ground for students being suspended or expelled in the aftermath of desegregation” (Wright Edelman et al., 1974, p. 147).

As these examples suggested, it was not just suspensions that were a problem; expulsion, too, was another tool of pushout in the immediate afterlife. The AFSC found that six weeks into the 1970 school year, across 465 desegregating districts included in their investigation, five times as many Black students had been expelled as whites (AFSC, 1970). Of the 90 districts with the largest and most disproportionate Black expulsion rates, 50 were in the 11 Southern states (SRC, 1973). Finally, the reports indicated instances of districts utilizing law enforcement as part of disciplinary responses in desegregating districts. Evidence about the use of police as a discipline response was documented in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas. Of specific information available, in 1972, Savannah, Georgia, public schools spent “$18,000 a month for a force of 35-armed security guards” by whom Black students and Black parents reported being harassed (ACHR, 1972, p. 98). Like suspension and expulsion, evidence from these reports showed instances where white education officials used police to intimidate and punish Black students who were responding to discriminatory treatment, including in Selma, Alabama, where officials called the police on Black students who were meeting to discuss and protest racial grievances occurring in the schools. In this way, the afterlife was constituted by a web of suspension, expulsion, and the use of law enforcement, often in response to Black students exercising self-determination and agency against racially oppressive systems (Sojoyner, 2013).

Conduct Codes: Anti-Black Rules

Changes to conduct codes emerged as another theme in the document review. Changes included districts increasing options for exclusionary discipline, indicating preparation among some to enact a pushout response as desegregation unfolded. In Texas and Mississippi, white school boards adopted new conduct codes that were stricter than those that previously existed. These new codes were riddled with racial stereotypes, making references to new rules on drugs, dress, and “grooming” (AFSC, 1970). In Tyler, Texas, the district revised its policy to prohibit Black girls from wearing what officials described as “Afro hairdos” in senior photos (AFSC, 1970, p. 61). In other parts of Texas, students were similarly prohibited from wearing any symbol associated with civil rights and Black power, with the school board saying that prior to desegregation, they “would not have had to spell these things out” (AFSC, 1970, p. 64). Some districts attempted to present such changes in nonracial terms; an impression was made upon a desegregation monitor who wrote:

some school districts have found a sudden need for new dress and discipline codes, a need that apparently did not exist [if] the schools were segregated. While an effort is frequently made to couch these new codes in “nonracial” terms, Black students feel, with justification, that they are directed at them. (AFSC, 1970, p. 64)

According to desegregation monitors in Selma and Mobile, Alabama, dress code rules about hats and hair length were more rigidly applied to Black students than whites, with similar reports from cities in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Of these rules, a Black student told a desegregation monitor that “[school officials] are going to be sure we don’t contaminate any of these white students” (AFSC, 1970, p. 60). As this quote suggests, these hair, dress, and hygiene rules echoed deeply white supremacist myths about racial purity and contamination (Bryan, 2020; Irby, 2014). Changes to, and enforcement of, discriminatory school dress codes thus appeared to be an avenue of the early afterlife of school segregation and one that provided the appearance of legitimized use of suspension and expulsion.

Discretion and Differential Treatment

Evidence from reports also attested to the use of individual discretion and arbitrary rule enforcement as a source for racial misuse of discipline consequences. In Norfolk, Virginia, a monitor reported that “rules are made by individual teachers or by the principal” (ACHR, 1972, p. 75). In Austin, Texas, “the enforcement of rules is at the discretion of the principals,” as was the case in Jefferson, Alabama, Tampa, Florida, and Monroe, Louisiana, where “the disciplinary code is in most cases left in the hands of the local administration, namely the principal” (ACHR, 1972, p. 75). Then, as now, personal discretion in the disciplinary process created room for racial discrimination (A. Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Welsh & Little, 2018). The role of racism was unequivocally addressed in monitors’ reports during early desegregation. Said one student in Texas, “One of the primary problems with enforcement is that each teacher and administrator can be an enforcer, and that racist teachers enforce it discriminatorily against Blacks” (ACHR, 1972, p. 75). Defense Fund monitors reported that a Whites Citizens Council (a white supremacist group comprised of middle- and upper-class whites) was asking white teachers and principals to take an oath to suspend a specific number of Black students per month—240 to be exact—and to suspend Black seniors (15 Black boys and 10 black girls, specifically) “so they wouldn’t graduate” (p. 133). Such rationale also pointed to the intentional white derailment of Black educational opportunity and Black youth leadership. Surveying school districts, the Children’s Defense Fund found that 66% of suspensions were for minor incidents, leaving the authors to conclude: “Not only are children thrown out of school for a vast array of offenses, they are frequently thrown out so arbitrarily and with so little apparent consideration for their personal and educational interests as to call into question the underlying validity of expulsion and suspension as school policies” (1974, p. 118).

Differential treatment, in which Black students were punished more harshly than white peers for the same offense, was also evident to desegregation monitors. There were examples of whites’ differential treatment of Black students. For instance, in Nacogdoches, Texas, where a fight broke out among several white boys and one Black boy, the Black boy was taken to the principal and police, but nothing happened to the white boys. Other examples pointed to the arbitrary use of suspension by white officials—for example, when two Black boys were expelled for allegedly “not being sincere enough about getting an education” (AFSC, 1970). Like Black boys, Black girls were also unfairly disciplined. For instance, in Mineral Springs, Arkansas, two Black girls were “suspended for refusing to say ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’” (AFSC, 1970, p. 66). It should be noted that evidence on the treatment of Black girls was not as frequently included in monitoring reports as was information about Black boys.

Exclusionary Discipline for Protesting Discrimination

One of the cruel realities of the immediate afterlife of school segregation was the use of exclusionary discipline by school officials in response to Black students’ protests against racial discrimination. In West Orange, Texas, Black students staged a walkout in protest of unfair school election processes and were met with suspensions and expulsions. In Iredell County, North Carolina, Black students staged a protest in response to an all-white homecoming court and were clubbed by police during the march (AFSC, 1970). In Magnolia, Arkansas, Black students organized a boycott in response to a lack of political representation on student government, and school officials responded by suspending and expelling them as a consequence.

Other instances in Alabama included the suspension, expulsion, and jailing of Black students who protested whites’ demotion of a reputable Black football coach (Perry County, Alabama) and whites’ use of the song “Dixie” as a school anthem (“Dixie” being the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy) (Tyler, Texas) (AFSC, 1970).

Indeed, when desegregation monitors analyzed the reasons for suspensions and expulsions across the districts, they concluded that when white students were suspended, it was most often for fighting, but that the most common reason that Black students were suspended was for protesting racial discrimination (AFSC, 1970). Monitors concluded that upwards of 80% of Black suspensions were assigned for this reason. Of suspending Black student leaders who organized protests in the schools, a school superintendent said principals should “suspend them freely” so “they won’t have anyone to lead them out” (p. 96). In other words, white officials should suspend Black student leaders to render other Black students leaderless. Such patterns suggested that to stand up against second-generation segregation was to incur the wrath of white resistance and reassertion of white supremacy inside of schools.

The injustice in suspending Black students for protesting discrimination was poignantly stated by CFD’s Edelman, who wrote that in the wake of Southern school desegregation, “Black kids have been in essence told, ‘you can come into our white schools, but you cannot fully participate’ and when they rebel against unequal and discriminatory treatment, they are punished by suspension and expulsion” (Wright Edelman et al., 1974, p. 133). In this way, the racially hostile conditions established by white school officials, staff, and students elicited protests by Black students, which were then used to further justify punishment and impose further obstacles in the pursuit of Black educational opportunity. Connecting with Hartman and ross’s sense of Black resistance and fugitivity in the face of oppression, the frequent use of discipline for protest may be read as indicative of the strength and determination embodied by Black youth who advocated collectively against unjust educational conditions.

Early Warning Calls: Civil Rights Organizations and Scholars

While these archival reports documented the litany of suspensions and expulsions occurring in desegregating schools, the reports themselves served additional purposes. It is important to recognize that these reports indicated a phenomenon underway in the early 1970s: the role of civil rights organizations that were documenting the abuses that emerged post-Brown. In the absence of strong federal enforcement, civil rights organizations were integral in monitoring desegregation and conducting a series of investigations and reports that raised the specter of anti-Black pushout. Oftentimes, organizations worked together and conducted joint investigations. The American Friends Service Committee, the Alabama Council on Human Relations, the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Washington Research Project (later the Children’s Defense Fund) and the Southern Regional Council were some of the prominent organizations that worked together to document the implementation of desegregation and to raise concerns about injustice Black students and educators faced.

In the forward to the 1974 report reviewed here, the lead author, Marian Wright Edelman, underscored the urgency of the issues, writing that although “Americans think of themselves as a child-loving people, this is a myth,” and urged that the conditions documented by the organization’s investigations required immediate “recognition and correction” (p. 11). To spur such correction, civil rights organizations were often involved in litigation at multiple levels to challenge school discipline-related abuses. Lawyers working in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina as part of the American Friends Service Committee defended Black students during suspension and expulsion hearings with white district officials. Some organizations weighed in on legal decisions that impacted school discipline protections across the nation. The Children’s Defense Fund itself filed an amicus brief, or “friend of the court,” to inform the Court’s understanding of pushout in what would become the Goss v. Lopez decision in 1975 that ensured due process protections for suspended students (419 U.S. 565).

In addition to civil rights organizations, university-based scholars used these reports to draw attention to school pushout, sounding early warnings as well. For example, in 1978, Dr. Nancy Arnez of Howard University wrote a piece arguing that desegregation was being implemented as a racially discriminatory process. She noted that “ironically, the desegregation of schools has had deleterious results for Black children in a number of ways, including disproportionate suspensions, expulsions, and pushouts due to disciplinary policies and procedures” (1978, p. 28). Arnez reiterated that Black students, to the benefit of whites, had been “victimized by unfair discipline practices and arbitrary school rules and regulations” (p. 29). In making her argument, she drew extensively from reports published by the Children’s Defense Fund, a connection that showcased how university scholars leveraged information provided by civil rights organizations to draw attention to civil rights abuses. Organizations, activists, and scholars appeared to play an important, if not critical, role in naming and drawing attention to the unfolding afterlife of school segregation in its early years.

Discussion

The goal of this analysis was to identify pathways to the early afterlife of school segregation and specifically its forms of exclusionary school discipline. Examining archival reports revealed that exclusionary school discipline in desegregation schools took several paths. First, the afterlife’s primary tools consisted of suspension and expulsion, and in some places were premised upon changes to codes that prohibited Black cultural symbols and elevated segregationist rules while punishing Black students for protesting the very racial discrimination incurred. The afterlife of school segregation here can be extended beyond suspensions and expulsions and the “kick outs and pushouts” (ross, 2020, p. 50) to include the education officials inscribing those processes. As these reports provide some insight into the institutional actors who arranged these various punishments, including school superintendents, school board members, principals and classroom teachers, the afterlife then necessitates not only a focus on the practices that oppress Black students but also those that perpetuate them—that is, education officials who, as these reports highlight, levied suspensions and expulsions and modified policies in ways that allowed for anti-Black disciplinary means. While an emphasis is placed on tools of anti-Black oppression, examples of Black students protesting discrimination in the face of threats to their immediate safety and welfare reflect Hartman and ross’s notions of the resistance that is possible and unfolding in everyday life to defy oppressive contexts (Hartman, 1997; ross, 2020).

While the preponderance of suspension and expulsion observed in these reports is not a novel finding (Chin, 2021), this synthesis does help illuminate the mechanisms through which disproportionate discipline between Black and white students emerged in some, but not all, desegregating districts. It indicates that in some places, white officials modified conduct codes to culturally target Black students and specifically to enforce segregationists, grooming, clothing, and gender norms. Scholars of contemporary racial disparities in discipline have spoken of the racialized and gendered rules of Black–white contact in today’s schools and argued for connections to desegregation, and a contribution of this article is in identifying examples of this within this earlier history (Bryan, 2020; Irby, 2014). These cross-racial rules could be explored further in future research. In addition, this analysis found the common use of punishment as a means to quell Black students’ protests against racial injustice. While these themes are not entirely new, they help corroborate the means of punishment identified elsewhere in desegregating districts and also implicate school and city officials in the harsh punishment of Black students during this era (Hale & Livingston, 2023; Kautz, 2023; Kupchik, 2025). Similarly, officials’ use of law enforcement as a response to Black students’ protests has been documented within sociohistorical analysis of the expansion of the carceral state in response to Black self-determination (Sojoyner, 2013). In these ways, the findings of this narrow analysis help to corroborate themes documented in other instances and buttress our understanding of the avenues of exclusionary discipline during desegregation.

Connections to Today

In education today, the disproportionate punishment of Black students remains a central civil rights concern. Schools continue to suspend Black students at higher rates than other racial groups, with 12% of Black students receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions, and Black students are at a greater risk across all discipline categories (Ksinan et al., 2019; Leung-Gagné et al., 2022). Ongoing disparities point to the larger obstacles put in place by antiblackness in education, with adverse impacts dispossessing Black students of later economic and political determination (Conwell, 2016). On matters of suspension, the practice indeed remains legal across every state, despite efforts to reduce exclusionary discipline at the federal, state, and local levels over the last 20 years (Education Commission of the States, 2019). While changes have been made in some states, including prohibitions on suspension for young children, these efforts have not consistently reduced disparities between Black and white students (Wiley et al., 2025). In this regard, as ross observed, suspensions remain a tool in the afterlife.

And, presently, the presence of antiblackness in conduct codes is evident in provisions related to clothing and hairstyles, where research has found that Black students, particularly Black girls, experience discriminatory discipline for reasons related to conduct code enforcement (Apugo et al., 2022; Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2020; Morris, 2016). For example, Carter Andrews et al. (2019) found that school officials more strictly enforced dress code rules with Black girls compared to their white peers. Similarly, a National Women’s Law Center study of Black girls found that school dress code policies still target Black girls and young women in regard to clothing and hairstyles and that administrators differentially enforce dress code policies for reasons involving racially biased assumptions of sexual promiscuity (NWLC, 2018, 2019). Black boys have also been targeted by unfair dress codes, including suspensions for culturally specific hairstyles that school administrators claim violate policy (Locke, 2022).

And like ross notes, arrests of Black students are a present issue today, an issue that gained significant attention following the murder of George Floyd, as community organizers and advocates helped increase historical understanding in mainstream press and raised awareness of post-Brown over-policing of Black children and youth (e.g., Advancement Project, 2018). Though they represent 15% of the public-school population, Black students are 28.7% of youth referred to law enforcement and 32% subjected to school-based arrest (U.S. Department of Education, 2023). And though law enforcement officers have been used in schools since prior to Brown, in the last several decades, the number of schools using them has increased substantially, as part of federal legislation (Irby & Coney, 2021). Contrary to common perceptions, adding officers does not prevent misconduct or violence (Javdani, 2019). Instead, their placement increases discipline and ticketing/arrests for minor incidents associated with typical adolescent behavior, and causal evidence indicates officers have a negative impact on Black students and students of color (Fisher & Hennessy, 2016; Sorensen et al., 2021; Weisburst, 2019). While dozens of districts initially relinquished their agreements with local police forces in 2020 and protests stemming from George Floyd, many have reverted back (NEPC, 2021).

The parallels between the early and later afterlife continue to show themselves. In addition to anti-Black conduct codes and policing, then, as now, personal discretion in the disciplinary process creates room for racial discrimination (A. Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Welsh & Little, 2018). Then, as now, teachers continue to be more critical of Black children, scrutinize Black children more closely for transgressions, and interpret their behavior in malevolent and criminalizing ways (Basile et al., 2019; Gilliam et al., 2016; A. Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Monroe, 2005). There are no neutral observers in the discipline process; rather, school staff continue to interpret Black children’s behavior, in what can be understood as a protest of unfair conditions, through criminal and racialized assumptions about Black students (Basile, 2020; Gilliam et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2023; Monroe, 2005).

Relatedly, the discretion exercised by school principals continues to be a concern. Then, as now, school leaders are in powerful positions to define school discipline expectations and practices (DeMatthews et al., 2015; Skiba et al., 2014; Theoharis, 2007). While districts and states establish school discipline guidelines, a majority of school principals believe they have a large influence on school-level discipline policy and practice (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022). This authority and discretion result in schools using a variety of different policies and practices, even when under the same district policy (e.g., Wiley et al., 2018; Lacoe & Steinberg, 2018). Although policies themselves may inconsistently impact the use of exclusionary discipline (see Ritter, 2018), decisions about which practices are used continue to be a matter of principals’ normative stances (Christie et al., 2004; Mukuria, 2002; Skiba et al., 2014; Wiley et al., 2018; Wu et al., 1982). It is important to recognize that while patterns of disproportionate discipline, discriminatory conduct codes, and officials’ discretion and autonomy suggest historical throughlines, drawing connections between past and present is a complex and contested analytic endeavor, and while this article does not layout the exhaustive chronology, the recurrence of these themes across temporal junctures constitutes a form of “bridging” work among education researchers in attempt to better historicize present racial inequalities (Wiley & Middleton, 2025).

Limitations and Future Research

There are several limitations to this analysis. First, the reports included in this analysis pertained only to specific years (1970, 1972, 1973, and 1974) and to districts and schools visited by investigators at the time. The themes cannot be assumed to generalize to all districts and schools. That racial disparities for Black students increased during desegregation and in desegregating schools is well evidenced (Chin, 2021), yet there are also examples of districts and schools where Black students were not disproportionately punished (Edelman et al., 1975; Larkin, 1979; Thornton & Trent, 1988). In addition, the reports included were produced by organizations that had a clear civil rights interest, which afforded a prioritization of data about Black students and civil rights concerns but, as artifacts, may overaffirm evidence and underrepresent disconfirming evidence. An implication of this may be that disconfirming evidence (particularly counterpoints to discrimination) may have been minimized, providing a less nuanced picture.

Furthermore, while the reports focused on adverse experiences of directly impacted Black youth, future studies might further nuance this by understanding the indirect harms that can also arise for Black youth who bear witness to harsh punishment (Jabbari & Johnson, 2020). Future research might also consider examining the unfolding of discipline in places where disparities did not emerge in desegregated schools to better understand related conditions and factors. Future analyses might also examine the civil rights organizations themselves and how they worked together and toward specific ends to conduct large-scale investigations and campaigns, and how this work influenced subsequent events—for example, the role of the Children’s Defense Fund’s research in the Goss v. Lopez Supreme Court decisions (419 U.S. 565, 1975).

The historical impacts of discipline across generations are additional areas for future research. Scholars have increasingly pointed out that anti-Black school discipline impacts not just a single instance of a child’s life but rather contributes to racial inequality across generations of Black Americans (Conwell, 2016; Love, 2019). Love (2019) writes about the impacts of exclusionary discipline and policing on Black youth between the decades of 1985–2005, a period spanning K–12 experiences and reverberating into the lives of Black adults today. Given that the early afterlife began 10–15 years earlier, what might be the intergenerational impacts of exclusionary school discipline? From a historical perspective, the impacts of anti-Black school discipline compound inequality over time, with parallel generations of white children and adults exempt from systemic educational obstacles while inequalities continue to amass for Black communities (Conwell, 2016; Diamond, 2024; Donnor, 2013; Justice, 2023; Love, 2019).

Recommendations for Ending Disparities for Black Students

Here I want to offer several recommendations for ending the disproportionate punishment of Black students, though recognizing that doing so may be at odds with ross’s and Hartman’s afterlife supposition that reforms themselves can contribute to oppression. Perhaps the strongest recommendation is to follow what has been known historically and recently further evidenced in scholarship—namely, that protective Black spaces where the full humanity of Black children are nurtured are necessary sanctuaries. This is reflected in the important histories among Black schools, even under the harsh conditions of segregation, where Black educators valiantly created fugitive spaces, and in Afrocentric schools and historically Black colleges and universities (Favors, 2019; King & Swartz, 2015; Walker, 2000). Recently, research has quantified the protective factor of Black educators for Black children regarding school discipline and numerous positive academic outcomes (Lindsay & Hart, 2017; Shirrell et al., 2023).

At the same time, seven million Black children attend public schools across the nation, schools where exclusionary discipline is a common practice. Until exclusionary practices are abolished, these disciplinary tools will remain a threat ready to be imposed. While difficult to accomplish, ending state-sanctioned exclusionary discipline and requiring—and resourcing—disparity-conscious positive disciplinary alternatives can help end exclusionary punishment writ large and the disproportionate uses of it with Black students (Darling-Hammond, 2023; McIntosh et al., 2021; Okonofua et al., 2022; Wiley et al., 2018). At the state level, laws to prohibit exclusionary discipline should be coupled with outreach across districts to ensure fidelity (see Ritter, 2018). Districts and schools can address anti-Black biases that contribute to disparities and conduct equity-focused reviews of discipline data and referral patterns to alter organizational practices (Hu & Hancock, 2024; Irby, 2021). Importantly, addressing discipline disparities for Black students requires looking beyond discipline to ensure that Black students have access to Black educators and expanding access to rigorous coursework with high-quality and affirming learning environments (Lindsay & Hart, 2017; Toldson et al., 2015; York et al., 2023).

Conclusion

Black critical theorists have brought forth an understanding of the historicity and ongoing use of anti-Black exclusionary discipline, and historians have excavated much detail around the ways in which these policies and practices have unfolded (Coles & Powell, 2020; Dumas & ross, 2016; Hale & Livingston, 2023; Kautz, 2023; Kupchik, 2025; ross, 2020). It is important that scholars working on today’s school discipline issues draw from those excavating connections between historical anti-Black punishment and broader anti-Black educational processes. While a growing body of literature historicizes this issue, a large proportion of contemporary research on school discipline and Black children continues to omit its racialized histories or presents them in simplistic and limited ways (Wiley & Middleton, 2025). It is understandably a difficult analytic task, and this article, in perhaps the most generous understanding of it, only accomplishes the feat of showcasing a sample of the afterlife’s possible scope. As work continues in this vein, may education scholars continue to historicize educational inequalities, challenge anti-Blackness, and create fugitive spaces to nurture resistance particularly during this time of race-conscious retrenchment in public education.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful feedback throughout the review process.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kathryn E. Wiley

Notes

Author

KATHRYN E. WILEY is an assistant professor of education at Howard University, School of Education, 2565 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 2001; email: kathryn.wiley@howard.edu. She uses multiple methods and a historical lens to understand contemporary education policies in the context of longstanding, racialized inequalities.

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