Highlighting the processes and missteps involved in creating and carrying out school desegregation policies in Chicago, Dionne Danns discusses the challenges of using the 1964 Civil Rights Act to implement school desegregation and the resultant limitations and effectiveness of government legislative power in bringing about social change.

A comprehensive history of school choice in the US, from its birth in the 1950s as the most effective weapon to oppose integration to its lasting impact in reshaping the public education system today. Most Americans today see school choice as their inalienable right. In The Choice We Face, scholar Jon Hale reveals what most fail to see: school choice is grounded in a complex history of race, exclusion, and inequality. Through evaluating historic and contemporary education policies, Hale demonstrates how reframing the way we see school choice represents an opportunity to evolve from complicity to action. The idea of school choice, which emerged in the 1950s during the civil rights movement, was disguised by American rhetoric as a symbol of freedom and individualism. Shaped by the ideas of conservative economist Milton Friedman, the school choice movement was a weapon used to oppose integration and maintain racist and classist inequalities. Still supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, this policy continues to shape American education in nuanced ways, Hale shows—from the expansion of for-profit charter schools and civil rights–based reform efforts to the appointment of Betsy DeVos. Exposing the origins of a movement that continues to privilege middle- to upper-class whites while depleting the resources for students left behind, The Choice We Face is a bold, definitive new history that promises to challenge long-held assumptions on education and redefines our moment as an opportunity to save it—a choice we will not have for much longer.

Scholars have long explored school desegregation through various lenses, examining policy, the role of the courts and federal government, resistance and backlash, and the fight to preserve Black schools. However, few studies have examined the group experiences of students within desegregated schools. Crossing Segregated Boundaries centers the experiences of over sixty graduates of the class of 1988 in three desegregated Chicago high schools. Chicago’s housing segregation and declining white enrollments severely curtailed the city’s school desegregation plan, and as a result desegregation options were academically stratified, providing limited opportunities for a chosen few while leaving the majority of students in segregated, underperforming schools. Nevertheless, desegregation did provide a transformative opportunity for those students involved. While desegregation was the external impetus that brought students together, the students themselves made integration possible, and many students found that the few years that they spent in these schools had a profound impact on broadening their understanding of different racial and ethnic groups. In very real ways, desegregated schools reduced racial isolation for those who took part.

This book examines the history of the school desegregation movement in St. Louis, Missouri. Underlining the 2014 killing of Michael Brown as a catalyst for re-examination of school desegregation, Rias delves into the connection between contemporary school segregation and social justice, probing the ways that “soft racism”—a term the author uses to describe the non-violent, yet equally harmful, types of protests that opponents of desegregation utilized—has permeated St. Louis since the days of Brown v. Board of Education. The chapters feature the voices of those who were central to the desegregation fight in St. Louis, showing how the devastating effects of school segregation and soft racism linger today.

Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

The desegregation situation is the keynote theme of the following chapters. I Each of them touches on a different dimension of the situation: the historical, the temporal, the spatial. But the reader, perusing the essays with the situation in mind, should remember that the desegregation situation should not be inter preted literally. Authorities and adults certainly, school-age children probably, are influenced by their awareness of a sequence of past and future situations. Some may even operate with William James's (1890, p. 608) notion of "the specious present" that "has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming," thus reducing the potency of the present situation. Others may be dancing to a slower tempo of change, thus becoming more responsive to the present situation. Whatever the perceived tempo, many must share the view that the future may reverse the direction of the past. Some may see that new future direction as unswerving, unending, or long-lasting; others may see it as short-lived. And it is through attention to the phenomenological description of desegregation that these issues can be explored; a theme that is considered in several of the following chapters.