After over half a century of court-directed efforts to redress the historical educational chasm between blacks and whites in the United States, both the past achievements and the future direction of school desegregation are uncertain. Too often, the early gains made in racially desegregating America's schools seem to have been halted, and in many cases reversed. Urban school decay is once again on the rise, with predictable consequences. For the very poorest minority students, who have limited educational options apart from dangerous, deteriorating neighbourhood schools, drop-out rates are high, standardised test scores are abysmally low, and violence is an everyday fact of life. The gulf between the unskilled, marginalised students being warehoused in these predominantly poor, minority schools on the one hand, and the increasingly high tech society they cannot compete in on the other, is growing. This ground-breaking book presents the viewpoints and research of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of school desegregation. It covers virtually the entire spectrum of thinking and scholarship on school desegregation and its promise, success, necessity, pitfalls and failures.

A powerful and inspiring record of one of the most significant periods in America's history, which presents the full historic scope of the hard-fought battle for civil rights. From the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which legal segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional, to the Nashville sit-ins organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and from the Freedom Rides to the March on Washington, to the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965-and covering everything in between--Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin's My Soul Is a Witness is the first comprehensive chronology of the civil rights era in America. This unique chronology extends the examination of civil rights activities beyond the South to include the North, Midwest, and Far West. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. was a towering figure during the era, the authors shift the focus to the thousands of people, places, and events that encompassed the Civil Rights movement. Each entry is based on information found in articles and reports published in three newspaper and periodical sources: The New York Times, Jet Magazine, and the Southern School News. Supplementing the basic chronology are longer features that explore larger topics in more depth and highlight issues well-known at the time but unknown today by scholars and the general public.