Download or read book Reading Writing and Race written by Davison M. Douglas and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation. In charting the path of racial change, Douglas considers the relative efficacy of the black community's use of public demonstrations and litigation to force desegregation. He also evaluates the role of the city's white business community, which was concerned with preserving Charlotte's image as a racially moderate city, in facilitating racial gains. Charlotte's white leadership, anxious to avoid economically damaging racial conflict, engaged in early but decidedly token integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the black community's public protest and litigation efforts. The insistence in the late 1960s on widespread busing, however, posed integration demands of an entirely different magnitude. As Douglas shows, the city's white leaders initially resisted the call for busing but eventually relented because they recognized the importance of a stable school system to the city's continued prosperity.

Download or read book Opening the Doors written by B. J. Hollars and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening the Doors is a wide-ranging account of the University of Alabama’s 1956 and 1963 desegregation attempts, as well as the little-known story of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s, own civil rights movement. Whereas E. Culpepper Clark’s The Schoolhouse Door remains the standard history of the University of Alabama’s desegregation, in Opening the Doors B. J. Hollars focuses on Tuscaloosa’s purposeful divide between “town” and “gown,” providing a new contextual framework for this landmark period in civil rights history. The image of George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door has long burned in American consciousness; however, just as interesting are the circumstances that led him there in the first place, a process that proved successful due to the concerted efforts of dedicated student leaders, a progressive university president, a steadfast administration, and secret negotiations between the U.S. Justice Department, the White House, and Alabama’s stubborn governor. In the months directly following Governor Wallace’s infamous stand, Tuscaloosa became home to a leader of a very different kind: twenty-eight-year-old African American reverend T. Y. Rogers, an up-and-comer in the civil rights movement, as well as the protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. After taking a post at Tuscaloosa’s First African Baptist Church, Rogers began laying the groundwork for the city’s own civil rights movement. In the summer of 1964, the struggle for equality in Tuscaloosa resulted in the integration of the city’s public facilities, a march on the county courthouse, a bloody battle between police and protesters, confrontations with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a bus boycott, and the near-accidental-lynching of movie star Jack Palance. Relying heavily on new firsthand accounts and personal interviews, newspapers, previously classified documents, and archival research, Hollars’s in-depth reporting reveals the courage and conviction of a town, its university, and the people who call it home.

Download or read book Forced to Fail written by Stephen J. Caldas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caldas and Bankston provide a critical, dispassionate analysis of why desegregation in the United States has failed to achieve the goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all students. They offer case histories through dozens of examples of failed desegregation plans from all over the country. The book takes a very broad perspective on race and education, situated in the larger context of the development of individual rights in Western civiliztion. The book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an ideal racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital—a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers—creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America.

Download or read book Elusive Equality written by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Elusive Equality, Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Charles H. Ford place Norfolk, Virginia, at the center of the South's school desegregation debates, tracing the crucial role that Norfolk's African Americans played in efforts to equalize and integrate the city's schools. The authors relate how local activists participated in the historic teacher-pay-parity cases of the 1930s and 1940s, how they fought against the school closures and "Massive Resistance" of the 1950s, and how they challenged continuing patterns of discrimination by insisting on crosstown busing in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the advances made by local activists, however, Littlejohn and Ford argue that the vaunted "urban advantage" supposedly now enjoyed by Norfolk's public schools is not easy to reconcile with the city's continuing gaps and disparities in relation to race and class. In analyzing the history of struggles over school integration in Norfolk, the authors scrutinize the stories told by participants, including premature declarations of victory that laud particular achievements while ignoring the larger context in which they take place. Their research confirms that Norfolk was a harbinger of national trends in educational policy and civil rights. Drawing on recently released archival materials, oral interviews, and the rich newspaper coverage in the Journal and Guide, Virginian-Pilot, and Ledger-Dispatch, Littlejohn and Ford present a comprehensive, multidimensional, and unsentimental analysis of the century-long effort to gain educational equality. A historical study with contemporary implications, their book offers a balanced view based on a thorough, sober look at where Norfolk's school district has been and where it is going.

Download or read book White Girl written by Clara Silverstein and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One woman’s memoir of coming of age while being bused to largely black schools after a Virginia legal battle forced integration in the 1970s. This poignant account recalls firsthand the upheaval surrounding court-ordered busing in the early 1970s to achieve school integration. As a white student sent to predominantly black schools in Richmond, Virginia, Clara Silverstein tells a story that pulls us into the forefront of this great social experiment. At school, she dealt daily with the unintended, unforeseen consequences of busing as she also negotiated the typical passions and concerns of young adulthood—all with little direction from her elders, who seemed just as bewildered by the changes around them. Inspired by her parents’ ideals, Silverstein remained in the public schools despite the emotional stakes. Her achingly honest story, woven with historical details, confronts us with powerful questions about race and the use of our schools to engineer social change. “At once a vivid description of a controversial social experiment, an intimate chronicle of a girl’s turbulent journey through adolescence, and a loving tribute to a visionary father who died too young.”—James S. Hirsch, author of Two Souls Indivisible “In White Girl, Clara Silverstein has written an honest, balanced, and deeply personal memoir. With lively prose she describes what it felt like to be perceived as “the enemy” and explains all the inherent contradictions in her own coming of age.”—Robert Pratt, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia “It’s easy to feel Silverstein’s anguish, but her message is that positive social change is possible.”—Library Journal

Download or read book Dismantling Desegregation written by Gary Orfield and published by The New Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the reversal of desegration in public schools

Download or read book Transforming the Elite written by Michelle A. Purdy and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

Download or read book After Brown written by Charles T. Clotfelter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, set into motion a process of desegregation that would eventually transform American public schools. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of how Brown's most visible effect--contact between students of different racial groups--has changed over the fifty years since the decision. Using both published and unpublished data on school enrollments from across the country, Charles Clotfelter uses measures of interracial contact, racial isolation, and segregation to chronicle the changes. He goes beyond previous studies by drawing on heretofore unanalyzed enrollment data covering the first decade after Brown, calculating segregation for metropolitan areas rather than just school districts, accounting for private schools, presenting recent information on segregation within schools, and measuring segregation in college enrollment. Two main conclusions emerge. First, interracial contact in American schools and colleges increased markedly over the period, with the most dramatic changes occurring in the previously segregated South. Second, despite this change, four main factors prevented even larger increases: white reluctance to accept racially mixed schools, the multiplicity of options for avoiding such schools, the willingness of local officials to accommodate the wishes of reluctant whites, and the eventual loss of will on the part of those who had been the strongest protagonists in the push for desegregation. Thus decreases in segregation within districts were partially offset by growing disparities between districts and by selected increases in private school enrollment.

Download or read book Between North and South written by Brett Gadsden and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between North and South chronicles the three-decade-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction. Historian Brett Gadsden begins by tracing the origins of a long litigation campaign by NAACP attorneys who translated popular complaints about the inequities in Jim Crow schooling into challenges to racial proscriptions in public education. Their legal victories subsequently provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, marking Delaware as a center of civil rights advancements. Gadsden's further examination of a novel metropolitan approach to address the problem of segregation in city and suburban schools, wherein proponents highlighted the web of state-sponsored discrimination that produced interrelated school and residential segregation, reveals the strategic creativity of civil rights activists. He shows us how, even in the face of concerted white opposition, these activists continued to advance civil rights reforms into the 1970s, secured one of the most progressive busing remedies in the nation, and created a potential model for desegregation efforts across the United States. Between North and South also explores how activists on both sides of the contest in this border state—adjacent to the Mason-Dixon line—helped create, perpetuate, and contest ideas of southern exceptionalism and northern innocence. Gadsden offers instead a new framework in which "southern-style" and "northern-style" modes of racial segregation and discrimination are revealed largely as regional myths that civil rights activists and opponents alternately evoked and strategically deployed to both advance and thwart reform.

Download or read book We Shall Not Be Moved written by Robert A. Pratt and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of a group of African-American lawyers and plaintiffs and their white allies who were determined to break down racial barriers at the University of Georgia in the 1950s. Reprint.

Download or read book Make Haste Slowly written by William Henry Kellar and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Girl Stands at the Door written by Rachel Devlin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today's ongoing struggles for equality.

Download or read book Separate Is Never Equal written by Duncan Tonatiuh and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Sylvia Mendez, an eight-year-old girl of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, played an instrumental role in Mendez v. Westminster, the landmark desegregation case of 1946 in California"--

Download or read book First Available Cell written by Chad R. Trulson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court and certain governmental actions struck down racial segregation in the larger society, American prison administrators still boldly adhered to discriminatory practices. Not until 1975 did legislation prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in Texas prisons. However, vestiges of this practice endured behind prison walls. Charting the transformation from segregation to desegregation in Texas prisons—which resulted in Texas prisons becoming one of the most desegregated places in America—First Available Cell chronicles the pivotal steps in the process, including prison director George J. Beto's 1965 decision to allow inmates of different races to co-exist in the same prison setting, defying Southern norms. The authors also clarify the significant impetus for change that emerged in 1972, when a Texas inmate filed a lawsuit alleging racial segregation and discrimination in the Texas Department of Corrections. Perhaps surprisingly, a multiracial group of prisoners sided with the TDC, fearing that desegregated housing would unleash racial violence. Members of the security staff also feared and predicted severe racial violence. Nearly two decades after the 1972 lawsuit, one vestige of segregation remained in place: the double cell. Revealing the aftermath of racial desegregation within that 9 x 5 foot space, First Available Cell tells the story of one of the greatest social experiments with racial desegregation in American history.

Download or read book When the Fences Come Down written by Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues in this thought-provoking book, within our metropolitan areas we are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district boundaries to divide students--and opportunities--along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. Siegel-Hawley takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on evidence from metropolitan school desegregation efforts in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, between 1990 and 2010, Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools both to underscore the damages wrought by school-district boundary lines and to raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear, measurable progress on both school and housing desegregation. Revisiting educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted--or never begun--this book will spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.

Download or read book The Desegregation Literature written by National Institute of Education (U.S.). Desegregation Studies Staff and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Little Child Shall Lead Them written by Brian J. Daugherity and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality, there was perhaps no setting more fraught and contentious than the public schools of the American south. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1951, a student strike for better school facilities became part of the NAACP legal campaign for school desegregation. That step ultimately brought this rural, agricultural county to the Supreme Court of the United States as one of five consolidated cases in the historic 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Unique among those cases, Prince Edward County took the extreme stance of closing its public school system entirely rather than comply with the desegregation ruling of the Court. The schools were closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964, until the Supreme Court ruling in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County ordered the restoration of public education in the county. This historical anthology brings together court cases, government documents, personal and scholarly writings, speeches, and journalism to represent the diverse voices and viewpoints of the battle in Prince Edward County for—and against—educational equality. Providing historical context and contemporary analysis, this book offers a new perspective of a largely overlooked episode and seeks to help place the struggle for public education in Prince Edward County into its proper place in the civil rights era.