School Integration in Prince George's County, Maryland: Introduction


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"We, at [the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare], felt that the Maryland school districts, by and large, ought to be able to make the transition from the dual school system without the footdragging that was going on in some Deep South districts." [1]

School desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland, should have been easy. After all, the county did not have to cope with overt racism in both its citizens and its elected officials or about this racism turning into organized violence directed at the teenage would-be school integrators, as did the states of the Deep South. The task facing the Prince George's County board of education and Superintendent William Schmidt after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, therefore, seemed to be fairly simple: eliminate the county's segregated dual school system and replace it with an integrated, unitary school system. Yet it was not until 1973, nearly 20 years after Brown, that the county finally implemented a desegregation plan comprehensive enough to please the federal courts and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. School integration in Prince George's County was complicated by covert racist attitudes, by segregated housing patterns, and by the "white flight" phenomenon of whites fleeing predominately black areas in and around cities for predominately white areas deeper in the suburbs.

  1. Background
  2. Early Steps Towards Desegregation
  3. HEW Steps In
  4. Turning to Busing


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Adapted from With Little Deliberate Speed: School Integration in Prince George's County, Maryland, a research paper written for my eleventh grade American history class.

Copyright © 1996 Lisa Cozzens (lisa@www.watson.org ). Please read this before you email me!
URL for this page: http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/school-integration/pgcounty/index.html
Last modified: Mon Jun 29, 1998