The death of George Floyd this spring turned Minneapolis into a symbol of America’s racial divide — a place where, as in many American cities, people of color feel sidelined, disrespected and cut off from opportunities.

But Minneapolis hasn’t always had that reputation.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the Twin Cities were seen as a model of racial and economic integration, celebrated as a place where state laws and local initiatives created some of the most far-reaching school and neighborhood integration programs in the nation.

Those efforts didn’t stamp out racism, said Helen Bassett, 70, a Black school board member in the suburban Robbinsdale Area school district near Minneapolis. But they gave people a way to better understand one another, “to relate to them on the basis of human decency.”

Today, however, the programs are mostly gone.

Like many U.S. cities that dismantled school integration programs in the wake of federal court decisions and shifting local politics, the Twin Cities have largely walked away from their once-touted initiatives, replacing them with a school choice system that was supposed to integrate schools by letting parents choose where to send their children, but has largely exacerbated segregation.

Bus routes that once transported students to intentionally integrated schools have stopped running. Magnet schools that once drew students from different neighborhoods have closed. And in the absence of those efforts, Black and white students have become increasingly isolated.

In the 1993-94 school year, less than one percent of Black students in the Minneapolis region attended highly segregated public schools — where 90 percent or more of the student body was not white, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Almost three decades later, in 2018, a quarter of the region's Black students were attending such schools.

NBC News found a similar rise in school racial segregation in 74 of the 100 most populous metro areas in the United States. Across the country, nearly 40 percent of Black students were in highly segregated schools in 2018, up from 33 percent in 1993. And in places like Minneapolis; Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee; and Tampa Bay, Florida, the increases were even sharper.

The consequences of that resegregation have been painful, said Rucker Johnson, an economist and public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We must think of racism as an infectious disease and silence leaves the disease untreated,” said Johnson, the author of “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.”

When communities resegregated schools, he said, they halted progress in bridging academic and economic gaps that had long existed between Blacks and whites. Johnson’s book documents his research following thousands of students from the heyday of school integration in the 1970s and ʼ80s. He found that when Black students attended integrated schools from kindergarten to 12th grade, they went further in high school and college, essentially eliminating differences in educational attainment between Black and white students. They earned higher wages compared to Black students who attended segregated schools, had more stable marriages, were more likely to avoid the criminal justice system and experienced health benefits later in life on par with being seven years younger.

“We see a pretty transformative impact,” said Johnson, who is African American and grew up in Minneapolis, where his mother was the superintendent of schools from 1997 to 2003. When schools began to resegregate, Black and Latino students increasingly landed in schools with fewer resources and less experienced teachers. That’s led to lower graduation rates, lower rates of college attendance and ultimately lower wages compared with their white peers.

NAACP protesting MPLS school board meeting -- Protestors fill a meeting room at the Minneapolis Public school headquarters to display their disagreement with recent school board policy regarding segregation and to support a NAACP lawsuit against the state (Marlin Levison / Star Tribune via Getty Images)More

White students who attend predominantly white schools, meanwhile, are more likely to bring racial biases into adulthood, Johnson said, meaning that when cities like Minneapolis resegregated their schools they set themselves up for a future of housing and employment discrimination, racial bias in classrooms, unequal treatment for patients in hospitals, and — ultimately — incidents like the killing of Floyd, a Black man who died with his neck under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.

“When law enforcement assumes guilt over innocence, when educators perpetuate a culture of low expectations and when health care is not preventative and accessible care,” Johnson said, “the consequences are tragic and destroy our opportunities.”

After Brown

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished school segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The Civil Rights Act a decade later made the ruling more enforceable. And by the 1970s, lawsuits filed on behalf of Black students had begun to desegregate schools.

In Charlotte, an ambitious effort to use busing to racially balance schools in Mecklenburg County was unanimously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The ruling paved the way for court-ordered busing programs around the country and turned the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district into a national model for school integration for 25 years.

Soon, hundreds of school districts were under court orders that redrew enrollment boundaries or put students on buses to take them to integrated schools.

As a result, the percent of Black students in highly segregated schools across the country was cut in half from 1968 to 1988, according to a 2019 report.

“It wasn’t perfect,” said Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Pennsylvania State University and one of the report’s authors. Many technically integrated schools steered white students to advanced classes that excluded Black students. Others subjected Black students to racist discipline policies that made it harder for them to succeed. Private schools sprang up, particularly in the South, to serve white students whose parents wanted segregated schools.

In the North, as the suburbs expanded, some areas, like Boston and Detroit, saw integration efforts thwarted by a 1974 Supreme Court ruling that barred judges from forcing suburbs to participate. That meant white families could avoid integration by moving to the suburbs, which many did.

Despite those challenges, Frankenberg said, it was a start. “We brought kids and teachers of different races together in the same building, which particularly in the South had not been done before, and the significance of that undertaking alone cannot be understated.”

“But then,” Frankenberg added, “we took our foot off the gas pedal for desegregation.”

A Supreme Court ruling in 1991 gave judges broad leeway to end integration programs if they believed a district had already complied in good faith. And, one by one, desegregation court orders began to fall.

Increasingly isolated

Across the United States, the percent of Black students in highly segregated schools has grown since 1993.

Across the United States, the percent of Black students in highly segregated schools has grown since 1993.

A white parent’s lawsuit toppled Charlotte’s integration program in 1999 despite objections from the district, which tried to defend it. Today, Charlotte has the most segregated schools in North Carolina, as well as significant achievement gaps between Black and white students.

While Black students represented just under a third of all students enrolled in public schools in the Charlotte metro area in 2018, an NBC News analysis found that a typical Black student attended a school that was disproportionately Black. This is a sharp change from 1988, when the average Black student attended a school that mirrored the demographics of the metro area.

Clustered together in Charlotte, North Carolina

White students are the largest racial group in Charlotte-area public schools, but Black students are still more likely to be in schools with other Black children.

Other rollbacks had a similar impact. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, two integrated high schools created by a 1979 desegregation order were replaced by smaller, more segregated schools in 2000 when that order was thrown out. Since 1993, the percent of Black students in highly segregated Tuscaloosa-area schools has grown from 39 percent to 53 percent.

In the Milwaukee metropolitan area, over the same time period, the percent of Black students in highly segregated schools has tripled. Kenosha, Wisc., the latest city to land in the national spotlight after the shooting of a Black man by police, has a relatively small Black population but the percentage of students in highly segregated schools is inching up. A city that did not have a single highly segregated school in 1993 had two such schools last year.

And across the country, Black and brown children have been increasingly concentrated in schools with high teacher turnover, aging textbooks, fewer advanced courses, and, ultimately, lower test scores. Blacks have continued to lag behind white peers on many economic measures. They’re less likely to attend and graduate from college, more likely to be unemployed, less likely to own their home and more likely to live in poverty.

‘We outlawed de facto segregation’

The story of school integration in Minneapolis is somewhat different from the rest of the country since it was state and regional policy — not a federal court order — that made the Twin Cities an integration success story, said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who has spent his career documenting the resegregation of schools and neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

Though Minneapolis schools were under a desegregation court order from 1972 to 1983, two local policies from that time had a bigger impact, Orfield said. One was a program that required municipalities in the region to develop affordable housing. That essentially prevented the suburbs from excluding low-income families that were more likely to be families of color.

The other was a state law that barred districts from concentrating too many students of any one race in any one school. If any school had significantly more Black or white or Latino students than the district as a whole, the district could lose state funding, Orfield said.

“We outlawed de facto segregation,” he said. “We forbid it and didn't allow it to occur in any form.”

Then the politics of integration began to shift. The housing policy fell victim to changes in federal funding and local priorities in the 1980s. The school desegregation law lasted into the 1990s, when the state’s governor and Legislature were on the verge of expanding it to include more of the suburbs. Then, in 1998, the state’s attorney general issued an opinion that largely gutted it, Orfield said.

The attorney general, Hubert H. “Skip” Humphrey III, was running for governor at the time. His opinion asserted, among other things, that existing desegregation programs were illegal.

“He just wiped it out,” Orfield said. “He changed our civil rights law by 180 degrees.”

Humphrey, who lost that race for governor, did not respond to requests for comment.

After that, Orfield said, desegregation efforts became largely optional — school districts that wanted to integrate could qualify for extra state funding, but districts could opt out without consequences, or use the funding ineffectively. At the same time, the rise of a new school choice system further hampered integration efforts.

Minnesota had been a national leader in school choice in the 1990s. It was the first state to allow privately run, publicly funded charter schools and it created programs allowing students to attend schools in neighboring districts.

Supporters believed choice would help integrate schools by giving low-income families of color a way out of low-performing schools. But in practice, some white families used choice to avoid integration.

“If families did not want to send their kids to a school with, quote, ‘those kids,’ they could escape, and a number did,” said Bill Green, who was the superintendent of Minneapolis schools from 2006 to 2010.

Choice programs also hurt Minneapolis schools financially, Green said. As suburban schools recruited city students — sometimes using desegregation dollars to do so — city enrollment declined, as did state funding. And Green, who is Black and now a history professor at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, questioned whether students of color were getting a better education in schools that didn’t necessarily have racially diverse teachers or curriculums.

As the choice system grew more popular, districts faced financial pressure and began pulling out of the multidistrict integration consortiums that, decades earlier, had created diverse magnet schools to comply with the law when it had more teeth. Most of those schools have closed.

The magnet schools had offered a “real, visible, tangible” way for the region to work toward “a common goal of equity and inclusion,” said Bassett, who served on the board of a regional integration consortium.

When districts walked away, “they dismantled something that was unique, that really set us apart," Bassett said. The region's integration programs “gave such hope," she added, "and then slowly, over time, it got chipped away and chipped away.”

‘They can do it everywhere’

Schools across the country have become more diverse in recent years as Hispanic and Asian populations have grown; white children are no longer a majority in public schools. But Black and Latino students in U.S. cities remain highly isolated. While 16 percent of U.S. public school students were Black in 2018, NBC News' analysis found that a typical Black student attended a school that was 48 percent Black.

Addressing this problem will require different solutions than those tried in the past, experts say. Recent Supreme Court rulings have largely barred the use of race in student enrollment, so districts would need to use other criteria, such as family income or ZIP code. Plus, suburban sprawl has spread students over larger areas, making busing to magnet schools more complicated.

Some experts, like Johnson, the Berkeley economist, say the solution includes housing policy changes aimed at integrating both neighborhoods and schools, as well as changes to school funding systems to prevent isolating needier children in financially strapped schools.

Others, like Frankenberg, from Penn State, said new technology such as computer models that could identify effective changes to school attendance zones could be deployed to help schools desegregate.

And in Minneapolis, Dan Shulman is using the tool that worked back in the 20th century: a lawsuit.

A suit Shulman filed on behalf of Minneapolis and St. Paul students in 2015 — Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota — won the backing of the state Supreme Court on a key argument and is now in mediation.

Shulman, a staff attorney for the Minnesota ACLU, said he’s been working on a settlement with Attorney General Keith Ellison. The two are developing integration strategies that could withstand legal challenges, including adding magnet schools and hiring and retaining teachers who are highly qualified and diverse, Shulman said.

Just as protests on the streets in Minneapolis this spring inspired similar demonstrations in cities across the country, Shulman hopes his desegregation lawsuit can inspire efforts elsewhere.

“Now we have a national black eye, which is well deserved and long overdue,” he said, citing statistics that show large academic and economic gaps between Black and white residents of the region.

But he hopes his lawsuit can change that.

“If we can do it here in one of the worst areas, with the greatest gaps and the most segregation,” he said, “they can do it everywhere.”

In the early days of August, the Columbia County School District outside Augusta, Georgia, was determined to open its schools.

Despite a regional surge of COVID-19 cases early that month, the system of 28,000 students was among the first districts in America to put people back in classrooms, on Aug. 3.

The reason was pretty straightforward, said Superintendent Sandra Carraway: The vast majority of Columbia County parents said they wanted schools open. Waiting wasn't going to make anything better, she added, and the district offered a learn-from-home option as an alternative.

"We're doing very well," Carraway said at the end of the third week of classes.

Many teachers disagree. Forty-six students and 28 staff have tested positive for the virus, and 542 people have had to quarantine since school started, according to district figures as of Aug. 21. Teachers are trying to juggle students who come to school, those who opted for virtual learning, and those lost in the middle because of quarantine or because their parents switched them from in-person to virtual as outbreaks sprang up.

In-person school reopenings have been pushed by President Donald Trump, Republican politicians and many parents. But the experience of Columbia County and other districts that opened buildings this month shows a more complicated reality.

In many of these districts, large percentages of children are actually learning at home — because their parents chose virtual learning or because of a quarantine. Hybrid schedules also keep children at home on specific days or weeks.

"The reality is there is no one solution that fits everyone," said Cindy Mitchell, a parent of three children in Columbia County, all of whom are learning from home. She said she's acted as a whistleblower of sorts on behalf of local teachers who fear retribution from the district if they speak publicly about lax safety protocols and disorganization in reopening.

For example, staff and teachers are often confused about who's infected and who's merely under quarantine. Until recently, Columbia County administrators only alerted certain people to the cases. Some teachers told USA TODAY they only found out students in their classrooms had tested positive once parents posted the administrative notice they received to a Facebook group.

"Tracking attendance is a huge problem," said Judie Stork, a Spanish teacher at Lakeside High School in Columbia County.

Because kids keep moving around and class sizes keep changing, Stork sometimes teaches up to 20 students inside a modular trailer. Social distancing is difficult.

"It worries me that we're not always able to skip desks because of the numbers in some classes," she said.

'Boom — you get shut down'

The rest of America's schools will lurch into a new pandemic school year over the next few weeks.

Among urban districts, almost 80% will open remote-only, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, an education research organization in Washington. Those districts often serve communities of color, which have been disproportionately hammered by the virus. Polling shows many Black parents would prefer to learn from home.

In the suburbs, there's more support for in-person learning: Only about 34% of suburban districts plan to start remote-only, according to the center's report.

Back-to-school decisions: Parents torn as some schools face greater reopening risks

Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, has said reopening schools is best for kids, but districts shouldn't bring people together if the rate of local positive virus cases exceeds 10%.

"You go in, people get infected, and — boom — you get shut down," Fauci said in a webinar hosted by Healthline, a medical news website.

That's been the problem in Georgia.

Columbia County had a 12.6% positive rate among coronavirus tests as of Aug. 24.

The state has the second-highest rate of new COVID-19 infections, according to the latest White House coronavirus task force report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other news sites. That's actually an improvement. Georgia has dropped to 167 infections for every 100,000 people, from a previous 216. The national average is 93.

Georgia schools made headlines for other high-profile coronavirus outbreaks this month. The Cherokee County School District north of Atlanta had to quarantine hundreds of students after an outbreak, a number that grew to more than 2,000. In Dallas, Georgia, a photo of maskless high school students in hallways went viral. Days later, the high school had to temporarily shut down because of positive cases among students and staff.

Georgia's largest school district, Gwinnett County Schools, quarantined hundreds of employees even before students returned Aug. 12 because of an outbreak among staff during in-person planning.

In Columbia County, middle and high school students are required to wear masks during passing periods and when social distancing isn't possible. Some teachers told USA TODAY they can't do anything if students let them dangle or take them off in class.

Elementary school students, who have returned for in-person instruction five days a week, are not required to wear masks.

"Initially, we received no guidance that suggested they should," Carraway said.

In late July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended students wear masks, practice social distancing and wash their hands frequently in reopened schools.

Hundreds in quarantine

Teachers and students in reopened schools across the country are navigating new safety protocols.

"It's a challenge for everyone involved," said Tanya Hickson, a math teacher at Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, which opened Aug. 20. She posted a photo on Twitter of plexiglass dividers between closely packed student desks.

But the district requires masks, and students are good about wearing them, she said.

About 500 of the 1,200 students at Hickson's magnet school, Darnell-Cookman Middle-High School, have elected to return for a mix of in-person and at-home learning. The other students are learning virtually.

"I’m happy to see the faces of old students and get to know new students," Hickson said. "But it’s a lot of anxiety. It’s hard to not express that in front of the kids."

The risks of an outbreak are real.

In Tennessee, 97 virus cases were linked to the 109 districts that had started the year as of Aug. 13, most with in-person instruction.

In Florida, Martin County Schools sent more than 300 students home to quarantine because of virus cases within the first two weeks of school. Seminole County schools quarantined 175 students and staff after being open less than two weeks, the Orlando Sentinel reported. A minority of students in that district — 44% — are coming to in-person classes because of safety concerns.

Several schools in Indiana opened for in-person instruction and then shut down temporarily because of outbreaks. Avon Community Schools outside of Indianapolis opened July 29, only to revert to online learning for high school students because of positive cases. The school is now using both in-person and online learning, with students alternating between the two to reduce class sizes.

"You’re trying to keep track of kids who are COVID-positive, because they need lessons," said Suzy Lebo, a computer science teacher at Avon High School. "You’re also providing lessons to in-person people. And now we have kids dropping in-person and going to virtual because of situations happening at the school."

"There's a lot of fluidity."

Maskless students, missing students

Georgia was the first state to reopen its businesses, on April 24, and its governor has actively fought a mask mandate.

In Columbia County, as COVID-19 cases increased this summer, the number of parents that elected to have their kids learn in-person dropped from 85% to about 75%, according to the district.

Carraway, the superintendent, said the number of parents choosing in-person learning has remained steady since school started. Some teachers told USA TODAY dozens of their school's students have switched to learn-from-home; others reported just a couple have switched.

The logistics of attendance, class sizes and scheduling have challenged teachers at the middle and high schools. To enable social distancing, students attending in-person come every other day, according to where their name falls in the alphabet. But that hasn't made for an even split; a teacher may have seven students in class one day and the other 18 classmates the next.

Rosters are constantly changing. It's not always clear if a child is absent from in-person class because he or she is sick, or quarantining, or has switched from in-person learning to online classes and is therefore learning from a different teacher. Teachers say they wonder if some absent students have even been in touch with an instructor.

Carraway said they expected virus cases, but that parents wanted in-person learning, and science shows being in school is best for kids. The dissatisfied teachers are not representative of the district, she said. Many have reached out to share their approval.

Jannette Thomas, a science teacher at Grove Town High School, said all her students keep their masks on, and she has a large room that lets everyone spread out.

"Things are not utopia," added Danielle Starcher, a music teacher at River Ridge Elementary who travels room to room now, tapping out beats with children on disposable paper plates or plastic cups rather than shared instruments.

"Given the circumstances, we’re stepping up to the plate and doing the best we can."

Carraway added that older students are likely being more responsible wearing masks and sitting separately during lunch in school than they would be if they were learning from home.

"The vast majority of people are going out and doing things, and schools are probably the safest place students can be outside of isolation," she said.

Many Columbia County parents say they're happy schools are open. In fact, Caroline Washburn, a mother of daughters in middle and high school, said she wishes they could go every day.

Local private schools are providing instruction five days a week at all grade levels, which Washburn said she and her husband would prefer.

"When you go back to school, you’re going to have a rise in cases," Washburn said. "I’m hopeful that after the holidays, we do go back to a full-time attendance schedule. I can’t imagine this being the new normal."

A different approach next door

Next door, the Richmond County School District in Augusta is still waiting to open its schools.

More than 84% of the district's approximate 30,000 students are people of color, predominantly Black students. The rate of positive COVID-19 tests is currently 15.9% — well into the zone Fauci suggested would not be safe for reopening schools.

Already, 89 Richmond County employees have contracted the virus, according to the district. Two have died. The school board will decide on Sept. 1. whether students who wish to return face-to-face will be allowed to on Sept. 8, or if all children will start remotely instead, according to Richmond County school officials.

Whenver Richmond opens for in-person instruction, more than half of students won't be there. About 54% of parents have signaled they want to virtual instruction, according to the district.

Wayne Frazier, a Richmond County school board member and former school principal, said that's a good development, as there will be more space for kids to spread out in school buildings.

"We have a lot of single parents and a lot of working parents," Frazier said. "No answer is going to fit everyone."

One of those single, working parents is Mary Morning, who lives in Augusta and has two boys headed into fifth and sixth grades. Even though her younger son has special learning needs and she'll have to work from home again to monitor their progress, Morning thinks virtual education is the safer choice.

She regrets they'll miss orchestra and school sports teams, though.

"It's a lose-lose decision," she said./US TODAY