Bringing Desegregation Home

This study collects the oral histories of residents of a single county in North Carolina who lived through the consequences of desegregation, examining the complex social and historical constructions of racial difference in education.

This book is written for the Millennial Generation to educate them about what school desegregation was actually about—the struggle over white domination in the United States. The textbooks they read as high school students describe the heroic efforts of African Americans to achieve civil rights but do not describe who was denying them these rights—white Americans. The oral histories in this book reveal how individuals navigated efforts to achieve educational equity amidst efforts to reassert white domination. These accounts counter the textbook history the Millennial Generation read which omits the massive white resistance to school desegregation, the various ways whites used subterfuge to slow down and redirect school desegregation in what would more benefit whites, and the concerted white political backlash that has been ensconced in educational policy and reform beginning with A Nation at Risk and continuing in No Child Left Behind. That is, educational policy as we know it is all about asserting white domination and not about educating children, and thus the Millennial Generation is faced with undoing what their parents and grandparents have done.

This is the first comprehensive account of African American secondary education in the postwar era. Drawing on quantitative datasets, as well as oral history, this compelling narrative examines how African Americans narrowed the racial gap in high school completion. The authors explore regional variations in high school attendance across the United States and how intraracial factors affected attendance within racial groups. They also examine the larger social historical context, such as the national high school revolution, the civil rights movement, campaigns to expand schooling and urging youth to stay in school, and Black migration northward. Closing chapters focus on desegregation and the "urban crisis" of the 1960s and 1970s that accelerated “White flight” and funding problems for urban school systems. The conclusion summarizes these developments and briefly looks at the period since 1980, when secondary attainment levels stopped advancing for Blacks and Whites alike. Book Highlights: A comprehensive history, drawing on statistical analysis, archival research, and interviews with African Americans who attended school in the 1940s and 1950s.Lessons from the past, showing how parents and local communities played the most direct and dynamic role in the fight for access to education.Today’s major challenges, including the growth of inner-city poverty and changing family structures. John L. Rury is professor of education and (by courtesy) history at the University of Kansas. Shirley A. Hill is professor of sociology at the University of Kansas. “Based on prodigious research, The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling sets a new standard of excellence in social history and policy studies. The authors evocatively recreate the passions of the civil rights movement and centrality of public schools in the ongoing quest for justice, opportunity, and freedom.” —William J. Reese, Carl F. Kaestle WARF Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This book is a rich and compelling addition to the literature on secondary education generally and on secondary education for African Americans specifically. It will set the standard for historical studies on American high schools for a long time to come.” —Jeffrey Mirel, David L. Angus Collegiate Chair of Education, Professor of History, University of Michigan “The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling fills a major gap in the history of African American educational history. This book will be on my shelf and will no doubt be on the shelves of scholars and students who study African American educational history.” —Thomas V. O'Brien, Professor and Chair, Department of Educational Studies and Research, University of Southern Mississippi “This is the only book-length account of the growth and impact of secondary education for African Americans post-1930. With a unique and original analysis, the authors frame key themes not only within the common historiographical tradition of an unfolding of 'growth and development' over time, but correctly understand that high school entailed opportunities for ‘attainment’ in a broader social sense as well.” —Michael Fultz, Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"Undocumented Storytellers offers a critical exploration of the ways immigrants without legal status harness the power of storytelling as a means of activism. The book offers broad insights into the role of strategic framing and autobiographical story sharing in advocacy and social movements"--

This work uses autoethnography as an enterprise to deconstruct barriers that support the invisibility of diverse epistemologies. The reality of invisibility and silence has plagued "unvalued others" in their attempt to make known the cultural significance found in the planning and execution of research. As a result, this book purposes to support the visibility and voice of marginalized scholars who conduct autoethnographic research from a racial, gendered, and critical theoretical framework. This work further supports authentic inquiry as it examines and reexamines culturally diverse epistemologies as a viable and valuable framework for conducting autoethnographic research. Specifically, this work highlights racialized epistemologies as an inescapable factor in auotethnographic research in the context of schools.

Using first-person narratives collected through oral history interviews, this groundbreaking book collects black women's memories of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the American South.

Providing chronologies of important events, historical narratives from the first settlement to the present, and biographies of major figures, this work offers readers an unseen look at the history of racism from the perspective of individual states. From the initial impact of European settlement on indigenous populations to the racial divides caused by immigration and police shootings in the 21st century, each American state has imposed some form of racial restriction on its residents. The United States proclaims a belief in freedom and justice for all, but members of various minority racial groups have often faced a different reality, as seen in such examples as the forcible dispossession of indigenous peoples during the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws' crushing discrimination of blacks, and the manifest unfairness of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Including the District of Columbia, the 51 entries in these two volumes cover the state-specific histories of all of the major minority and immigrant groups in the United States, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Every state has had a unique experience in attempting to build a community comprising multiple racial groups, and the chronologies, narratives, and biographies that compose the entries in this collection explore the consequences of racism from states' perspectives, revealing distinct new insights into their respective racial histories.

This book examines the post-9/11 African American novels, developing a new critical discourse on everyday discursive practices of whiteness. It examines not only how instances of racialization are generated through the embodied practices of whiteness in everyday interracial social encounters, but also how whiteness is “undone” by and through the black embodied practices of black people, who find different ways of practicing their agency to work for social change.