Research & Reference
- School Segregation: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on school segregation. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- School Segregation and Integration: Library of CongressThe massive effort to desegregate public schools across the United States was a major goal of the Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1930s, lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had strategized to bring local lawsuits to court, arguing that separate was not equal and that every child, regardless of race, deserved a first-class education. These lawsuits were combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in schools in 1954. But the vast majority of segregated schools were not integrated until many years later. Many interviewees of the Civil Rights History Project recount a long, painful struggle that scarred many students, teachers, and parents.
- Share of black students in majority white schools in the United States from 1954 to 2011The statistic provides information on the share of black students in majority white schools in the United States from 1954 to 2011. In 2011, about 23 percent of black students were in schools where the majority of the student population was white.
- Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after BrownThe publication of this report marks the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. There have been many changes since the ruling, but intense levels of segregation—which had decreased markedly after 1954 for black students—are on the rise once again. White and Latino students are the most segregated groups.
The Road to Brown
The 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. It is also a moving and long overdue tribute to a visionary but little known black lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, "the man who killed Jim Crow."
Source: AVON
The Memphis 13
First grade can be scary even without the burden of making history. The Memphis 13 shares the stories of 13 courageous first graders who were the first to desegregate schools in Memphis in 1961. The film, featuring interviews from all 13 families and others involved in school desegregation in Memphis, not only shares the long overlooked stories of brave families, but also provides a starting point for conversations about inclusion, tolerance, and social change.
Source: AVON
Perspectives
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?
Root and Branch
The riveting story of the two crusading lawyers who led the legal battle to end segregation, one case and one courtroom at a time. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston was the pioneer: After becoming the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review, he transformed the law school at all-black Howard University into a West Point for civil rights advocacy. One of Houston's students at Howard was a brash young man named Thurgood Marshall. Soon after Marshall's graduation, Houston and Marshall opened the NAACP's legal office. The abstemious, proper Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely duo, but together they faced down angry Southern mobs, negotiated with presidents and senators, and convinced even racist judges and juries that the Constitution demanded equal justice under law for all American citizens. Houston, tragically, would die before his strategy came to fruition in the Brown suit, but Marshall would argue the case victoriously and go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court justice--always crediting his mentor for teaching him everything he knew. Together, the two advocates changed the course of American history.
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.
Hello Professor
Like many black school principals, Ulysses Byas, who served the Gainesville, Georgia, school system in the 1950s and 1960s, was reverently addressed by community members as "Professor." He kept copious notes and records throughout his career, documenting efforts to improve the education of blacks. Through conversations with Byas and access to his extensive archives on his principalship, Vanessa Siddle Walker finds that black principals were well positioned in the community to serve as conduits of ideas, knowledge, and tools to support black resistance to officially sanctioned regressive educational systems in the Jim Crow South. Walker explains that principals participated in local, regional, and national associations, comprising a black educational network through which power structures were formed and ideas were spread to schools across the South. The professor enabled local school empowerment and applied the collective wisdom of the network to pursue common school projects such as pressuring school superintendents for funding, structuring professional development for teachers, and generating local action that was informed by research in academic practice. The professor was uniquely positioned to learn about and deploy resources made available through these networks. Walker's record of the transfer of ideology from black organizations into a local setting illuminates the remembered activities of black schools throughout the South and recalls for a new generation the role of the professor in uplifting black communities.
A Mighty Long Way
When fourteen-year-old Carlotta Walls walked up the stairs of Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, she and eight other black students only wanted to make it to class. But the journey of the "Little Rock Nine," as they came to be known, would lead the nation on an even longer and much more turbulent path, one that would challenge prevailing attitudes, break down barriers, and forever change the landscape of America.Descended from a line of proud black landowners and businessmen, Carlotta was raised to believe that education was the key to success. She embraced learning and excelled in her studies at the black schools she attended throughout the 1950s. With Brown v. Board of Education erasing the color divide in classrooms across the country, the teenager volunteered to be among the first black students-of whom she was the youngest-to integrate nearby Central High School, considered one of the nation's best academic institutions.But for Carlotta and her eight comrades, simply getting through the door was the first of many trials. Angry mobs of white students and their parents hurled taunts, insults, and threats. Arkansas's governor used the National Guard to bar the black students from entering the school. Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to send in the 101st Airborne to establish order and escort the Nine into the building. That was just the start of a heartbreaking three-year journey for Carlotta, who would see her home bombed, a crime for which her own father was a suspect and for which a friend of Carlotta's was ultimately jailed-albeit wrongly, in Carlotta's eyes. But she persevered to the victorious end- her graduation from Central.Breaking her silence at last and sharing her story for the first time, Carlotta Walls has written an inspiring, thoroughly engrossing memoir that is not only a testament to the power of one to make a difference but also of the sacrifices made by families and communities that found themselves a part of history.Complete with compelling photographs of the time, A Mighty Long Way shines a light on this watershed moment in civil rights history and shows that determination, fortitude, and the ability to change the world are not exclusive to a few special people but are inherent within us all.
With All Deliberate Speed
This is the first effort to provide a broad assessment of how well the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared an end to segregated schools in the United States was implemented. Written by a distinguished group of historians, the twelve essays in this collection examine how African Americans and their supporters in twelve states--Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Delaware, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada, and Wisconsin--dealt with the Court's mandate to desegregate "with all deliberate speed"? The process followed many diverse paths. Some of the common themes in these efforts were the importance of black activism, especially the crucial role played by the NAACP; entrenched white opposition to school integration, which wasn't just a southern state issue, as is shown in Delaware, Wisconsin, and Indiana; and the role of the federal government, a sometimes inconstant and sometimes reluctant source of support for implementing Brown.
The Shame of the Nation
“The nation needs to be confronted with the crime that we’re committing and the promises we are betraying. This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers comfortable.” Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know white children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children and their teachers and some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community,The Shame of the Nationis a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens. FromThe Shame of the Nation “I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,” the president said in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. “It’s working. It’s making a difference.” It is one of those deadly lies, which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth. But it is not the truth, and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the poor and, if it is not forcefully resisted and denounced, it is going to lead our nation even further in a perilous direction. Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook From the Hardcover edition.
Brown Vs Board Of Education
The unanimous overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Source: Kanopy
Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation: Crash Course Black American History
The United States' Constitution is not a very detailed document. It lays out the basic structure of government, and the details are filled in with legislation, and clarified and reinforced by court decisions. One of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions was the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson, which set the precedent that segregating people by race was acceptable. This meant that every public accommodation had the right to refuse to serve Black Americans, and that even public institutions like schools could be segregated. While the decision did stipulate that the segregated accommodations be "separate but equal," the equal part of that equation was often left out.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbZUQGPMTjk