WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- The United States is moving closer to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "nightmare" of "two school systems" and "two housing markets."
A report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project shows progress toward school desegregation peaked in the late 1980s, but in the past 15 years the figure had fallen to 30 percent, or about the level in 1969 -- the year after King's assassination, the Washington Post reported.
"Schools across the nation are becoming increasingly segregated," the report said.
"Most schools in this country are overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white," said Elise Boddie, head of the education department of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which litigates civil rights cases.
"We have still not committed ourselves as a country to the mandate of Brown versus Board of Education. If these trends are not reversed, we could easily find ourselves back to 1954."
The report said massive migrations of blacks and Hispanics toward the suburbs is producing "hundreds of new segregated and unequal schools and frustrating the dream of middle-class minority families for access to the most competitive schools."
The suburbs could be threatened with the problems of "ghettoization" that have already affected big urban areas, the report said.
