Internet Resources
- How racial disparities create unequal access to education.Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.
- Race Matters: How Race Affects Education OpportunitiesHow racial disparities create unequal access to education.
- Unequal Opportunity: Race and EducationAn article from the Brookings Institute on race and education in the United States.
Journals & Reference Materials (Log in Required)
- Race, Ethnicity, & EducationPublishes research on racism and race inequality in education, covering the dynamics of race, racism and ethnicity in education theory, policy and practice.
Streaming Media
- Brown Vs Board Of EducationThe unanimous overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
- Marley Dias Talks Institutional RacismFor 11-year-old Marley Dias, the call to activism began with books. Frustrated by not seeing other Black girls as the main characters in the books in her school library, she decided to take action and make a change. The wildly successful social media project, #1000blackgirlbooks, Dias launched nearly a year ago with the help of her mother, hit a nerve—and has exceeded its goal of collecting and distributing 1,000 books. The sixth grader already knows that racism and other built-in barriers are “keeping kids like me from reaching our full potential.” Tackling racism, she says, begins with a conversation. In a new national video on institutional racism, Dias looks to educators across the country and asks: “Do you care enough to look closer, to talk to each other. To your students, to your communities?”
- The Road To BrownTHE ROAD TO BROWN tells the story of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as the culmination of a brilliant legal assault on segregation that launched the Civil Rights movement.
- Separate and UnequalSixty years after the Supreme Court declared separate schools for black and white children unconstitutional, school segregation is making a comeback. What’s behind the growing racial divide in American schools — and what’s the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education? In part two, Omarina's Story, FRONTLINE revisits a student who made the most of her "middle school moment".
- Teach Us AllSixty years after the Little Rock Nine faced mobs of racially charged hatred and became cornerstones of the Civil Rights movement, TEACH US ALL examines how the present day United States education system fails to live up to that promise of desegregation as it slides back into a re-segregation of its modern schools.
Books & Films: Check Out at McKee Library
Can We Talk about Race?
Beverly Daniel Tatum emerged on the national scene in 1997 with "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?," a book that spoke to a wide audience about the psychological dynamics of race relations in America. Tatum's unique ability to get people talking about race captured the attention of many, from Oprah Winfrey to President Clinton, who invited her to join him in his nationally televised dialogues on race. In her first book since that pathbreaking success, Tatum starts with a warning call about the increasing but underreported resegregation of America. A selfdescribed "integration baby"-she was born in 1954-Tatum sees our growing isolation from each other as deeply problematic, and she believes that schools can be key institutions for forging connections across the racial divide. In this ambitious, accessible book, Tatum examines some of the most resonant issues in American education and race relations: •The need of African American students to see themselves reflected in curricula and institutions •How unexamined racial attitudes can negatively affect minority-student achievement •The possibilities-and complications-of intimate crossracial friendships Tatum approaches all these topics with the blend of analysis and storytelling that make her one of our most persuasive and engaging commentators on race. Can We Talk About Race? launches a collaborative lecture and book series between Beacon Press and Simmons College, which aims to reinvigorate a crucial national public conversation on race, education and democracy. Beverly Daniel Tatum is author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Assimilation Blues. She is currently president of Spelman College in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband.
Ebony and Ivy
A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution's complex and contested involvement in slavery-setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. InEbony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy. Many of America's revered colleges and universities-from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC-were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them. Ebony and Ivy is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.
Another Kind of Public Education
One of America's most distinguished scholars of race shows us how public education needs to be seen in the light of the influence of "color-blind racism as a system of power." Drawing examples from schools, media, and the workplace, Collins gives us a book of social analysis that is also an energizing handbook for change. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Brown V. Board of Education
Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" Here, in a concise, compelling narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African-Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits (at great personal cost); to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision. Others include segregationist politicians like Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon; and controversial Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Most Americans still see Brown as a triumph--but was it? Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. Could the Court--or President Eisenhower--have done more to ensure compliance with Brown? Did the decision touch off the modern civil rights movement? How useful are court-ordered busing and affirmative action against racial segregation? To what extent has racial mixing affected the academic achievement of black children? Where indeed do we go from here to realize the expectations of Marshall, Ellison, and others in 1954?
Lessons from Little Rock
In his compelling memoir detailing the Little Rock Desegregation Crisis of 1957, "Little Rock Nine" member Terrence Roberts opens the door to the life he and his family lived in the segregated South in the 1950s-a place where some birth announcements in the daily paper addressed new parents as Mr. and Mrs., while others did ¬ a place where some patrons were welcomed to sit at restaurant tables, were welcomed to sit at restaurant tables, while others had to take their food to go; a place where some could walk to school or work without fear, while others could ¬ a place where some teens were prepped for lives of prosperity and respect, while others were not. Roberts gives an eye-witness account of what readers will recognize as history, yet to the young man living through these tumultuous events was just life in a country on the cusp of momentous change. Book jacket.
The Color of School Reform
Why is it so difficult to design and implement fundamental educational reform in large city schools in spite of broad popular support for change? How does the politics of race complicate the challenge of building and sustaining coalitions for improving urban schools? These questions have provoked a great deal of theorizing, but this is the first book to explore the issues on the basis of extensive, solid evidence. Here a group of political scientists examines education reform in Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., where local governmental authority has passed from white to black leaders. The authors show that black administrative control of big-city school systems has not translated into broad improvements in the quality of public education within black-led cities. Race can be crucial, however, in fostering the broad civic involvement perhaps most needed for school reform. In each city examined, reform efforts often arise but collapse, partly because leaders are unable to craft effective political coalitions that would commit community resources to a concrete policy agenda. What undermines the leadership, according to the authors, is the complex role of race in each city. First, public authority does not guarantee access to private resources, usually still controlled by white economic elites. Second, local authorities must interact with external actors, at the state and national levels, who remain predominantly white. Finally, issues of race divide the African American community itself and often place limits on what leaders can and cannot do. Filled with insightful explanations together with recommendations for policy change, this book is an important component of the debate now being waged among researchers, education activists, and the community as a whole.
Through My Eyes
In November 1960, all of America watched as a tiny six-year-old black girl, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. An icon of the civil rights movement, Ruby Bridges chronicles each dramatic step of this pivotal event in history through her own words.