AJS Volume 107 Number 3 (November 2001): 679–716 679  2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2001/10703-0004$10.00 Race, School Integration, and Friendship Segregation in America 1 James Moody Ohio State University Integrated schools may still be substantively segregated if friend- ships fall within race. Drawing on contact theory, this study tests whether school organization affects friendship segregation in a na- tional sample of adolescent friendship networks. The results show that friendship segregation peaks in moderately heterogeneous schools but declines at the highest heterogeneity levels. As suggested by contact theory, in schools where extracurricular activities are integrated, grades tightly bound friendship, and races mix within tracks, friendship segregation is less pronounced. The generally pos- itive relation between heterogeneity and friendship segregation sug- gests that integration strategies built on concentrating minorities in large schools may accentuate friendship segregation. INTRODUCTION In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not legally separate students by race, officially asserting that our society should be race-blind. If schools are blind to race, then school racial distributions should reflect the distribution of race in the community. At the heart of Brown was the recognition that separate could never be equal, in part because the social relations formed in school are an essential part of the educational process. Subsequently, both legal and scholarly attention has largely focused on the distribution of race within schools. While racially heterogeneous schools may be formally integrated, they are substantively segregated if students interact most often with others of 1 Funding for work on this article came from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Thanks to Peter S. Bearman, Lisa A. Keister, Martina Morris, David Jacobs, Doug Downey, Elizabeth Cooksey, Susanne Bunn, and Jill Burkart for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to the AJS reviewers, who provided helpful and extensive comments on this article. Direct cor- respondence to James Moody, 372 Bricker Hall, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210. E-mail: Moody.77@osu.edu