HEW’s abrupt reversal in Chicago reverberated locally and nationally. Representative Pucinski described the decision as “an abject surrender by HEW—a great victory for local government, a great victory for Chicago.” The New York Times saw the Chicago fund case as “a singular instance of a northern city’s cry of ‘states rights’—more precisely, ‘city’s rights’—to defeat a Johnson Administration strategy.” For New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Chicago “represented the first abject surrender to the principle that separate but equal is wrong in the South, but acceptable in the North—particularly if a city can muster enough Northern politicians and educators with a segregationist mentality to practice this shameful hypocrisy.”

For HEW, Chicago ended discussions of using Title VI to eliminate so-called “de facto” segregation and significantly limited federal investigations of school segregation outside of the South. Ruby Martin, who later directed the Office of Civil Rights of HEW, described Chicago as a “tremendous setback” for HEW. After Chicago, she said, “We made a conscious decision—some people call it a political decision—not to take on any large school districts…because our resources are limited. You can get involved in a large city for two years and come out of it bloodied, bruised, and scarred, and nothing [is] going to change the situation.” For school officials, politicians, and civil-rights advocates in other Northern cities who were following the case, the lesson from Chicago was that federal authorities did not have the resources or political will to combat school segregation in the North. Chicago’s Benjamin Willis was the nation’s most influential school superintendent in this era. His near absolute resistance to civil rights, in the face of public protests and federal investigations influenced what school officials in cities like Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco felt was necessary or required to satisfy federal civil-rights standards. HEW’s surrender in Chicago encouraged school officials and politicians in cities to maintain positions of resistance and noncompliance with regard to school desegregation, while it led black parents and students to doubt that any federal authority could successfully address their concerns.

In 1979, HEW finally released a statement charging that since 1938, Chicago’s school board had “created, maintained, and exacerbated…unlawfully segregated schools system-wide.” This charge of intentional segregation validated the complaints made by civil-rights advocates over the previous 20 years. The 1979 HEW statement again faced a resistant school board and lack of federal support, especially after the Reagan administration reorganized HEW into Human Services and shifted what little civil-rights enforcement there was to the Justice Department. In 1983, a U.S. district judge approved a consent decree between the Chicago school board and the Justice Department that called for majority-white schools to have at least 30 percent minority enrollment and for increased use of magnet schools to encourage voluntary integration, but did little to improve educational opportunities at the city’s remaining all-black or majority-minority schools. Today, Chicago’s schools remain among the most segregated in the country in terms of race and socio-economic status. Over 85 percent of black students attend schools that are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic, and nearly 70 percent of black students attend school that are at least 90 percent black. African-American parents, students, and teachers in Chicago today are fighting against school closures in black neighborhoods and corruption among Chicago Public School officials.

It is great that Democratic voters are debating the civil-rights records of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and that more people now recognize that civil-rights activists were organized, creative, and persistent in the North as well as the South. More importantly, the history of civil rights and school segregation in Chicago, of which Sanders’s 1963 arrest is a part, makes it clear how far America must still travel to achieve equality.