As of the mid 2010s,[update] BASL is still used by signers in the South despite public schools having been legally desegregated since 1954.

Skinner described his school as "the first effort of its kind in the country ... We receive and instruct those and only those who are refused admission to all other institutions and are despised on account of their color.

Even after these states outlawed segregation by 1900, integration was sparse, as some institutions allowed black students and others did not.

The first school established for Black Deaf children below the Mason–Dixon line opened in the District of Columbia in 1857; it remained segregated until 1958.

Oralist methods often forbid the use of American Sign Language, so Black Deaf students had more opportunities to use ASL than did their white peers.

Despite the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, integration was slow to come.

"[12] Carl G. Croneberg was the first to discuss differences between BASL and White ASL in his appendices of the 1965 version of the Dictionary of American Sign Language.

[13][14] As Deaf education and sign language research continued to evolve, so did the perception of ASL.

The greater acceptance of ASL as a language led to standardization and the development of a prestige dialect, which was based upon the signs used at Gallaudet University.

Less marked forms, such as pronouns, determiners, plain verbs, and nouns, tend to be less likely to be produced outside the typical signing space.

[26] BASL signers further tend to favor lowered variants of side-of-forehead signs resulting in contact at the cheek.

[27][28] Early research showed that BASL signers used these lowered forms at a rate of 53 percent, with grammatical category being the strongest constraint.

[33] Lexical variation between BASL and other dialects of ASL was first noted in the Dictionary of American Sign Language.

Most of these signs, having been developed in segregated schools for the Black Deaf, refer to everyday life.

[38] When asked about distinctive features of their signing, Black Deaf signers tended to identify a number of idioms borrowed from AAVE.