eneration city-dwelling blacks continue to think of home as the Southern place from which the family came. Education Until the post-World War II period, most blacks seeking higher education attended private BLACK COLLEGES located mainly in the South. Most of these had been started in the years immediately following the Civil War as a joint effort of blacks, Northern church groups, and the Freedmen's Bureau. Among these were Fisk University, Atlanta University, Talladega College, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. Late in the 19th century Tuskegee Institute was founded by Booker T. Washington, and a number of colleges were established by black church groups. Almost all blacks who received a college education before 1940 attended these institutions. In the 1940s some improvement was made in publicly supported institutions of higher education for blacks, and for the first time black students began to appear in colleges that had previously been all white. In the 1970s the percentage of blacks attending college increased markedly, but in the 1980s blacks lost ground. Although desegregation of the public schools in the South proceeded slowly for the first decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, by 1969 school districts in every state were at least in token compliance with the 1954 ruling. By that time all forms of de jure segregation had been struck down by the courts. De facto school segregation continued, however, in large part because the communities the schools served were segregated in their residential patterns. This was particularly true in large urban areas and more prevalent in the North than in the South. One method adopted to overcome such segregation was to bus children across school district lines in order to achieve racial balance in the schools. This caused major controversy and led to instances of violent opposition . The overwhelming majority of black children now attend formally integrated schools, althou...
