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.

The only book-length study of the ways that postsecondary desegregation litigation and policy affected writing instruction and assessment in US colleges, Desegregation State provides a history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs from 1970 to 1988. Focusing on the University System of Georgia and two of its public colleges in Savannah, one a historically segregated white college and the other a historically Black college, Annie S. Mendenhall shows how desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation efforts in southern and border states. Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today. Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.

Enacted nearly fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act codified a new vision for American society by formally ending segregation and banning race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But how much change did the legislation actually produce? As employers responded to the law, did new and more subtle forms of inequality emerge in the workplace? In an insightful analysis that combines history with a rigorous empirical analysis of newly available data, Documenting Desegregation offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America—and what needs to be done in order to achieve a truly integrated workforce. Weaving strands of history, cognitive psychology, and demography, Documenting Desgregation provides a compelling exploration of the ways legislation can affect employer behavior and produce change. Authors Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey use a remarkable historical record—data from more than six million workplaces collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since 1966—to present a sobering portrait of race and gender in the American workplace. Progress has been decidedly uneven: black men, black women, and white women have prospered in firms that rely on educational credentials when hiring, though white women have advanced more quickly. And white men have hardly fallen behind—they now hold more managerial positions than they did in 1964. The authors argue that the Civil Rights Act's equal opportunity clauses have been most effective when accompanied by social movements demanding changes. EEOC data show that African American men made rapid gains in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, white women gained access to more professional and managerial jobs in the 1970s as regulators and policymakers began to enact and enforce gender discrimination laws. By the 1980s, however, racial desegregation had stalled, reflecting the dimmed status of the Civil Rights agenda. Racial and gender employment segregation remain high today, and, alarmingly, many firms, particularly in high-wage industries, seem to be moving in the wrong direction and have shown signs of resegregating since the 1980s. To counter this worrying trend, the authors propose new methods to increase diversity by changing industry norms, holding human resources managers to account, and exerting renewed government pressure on large corporations to make equal employment opportunity a national priority. At a time of high unemployment and rising inequality, Documenting Desegregation provides an incisive re-examination of America's tortured pursuit of equal employment opportunity. This important new book will be an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.

HAROLD B. GERARD AND NORMAN MILLER In the fall of 1965, when the school board of the Riverside Unified School District made its momentous decision to desegregate the ele mentary schools in Riverside, both of us were faculty members in the psychology department on the Riverside campus of the University of California. The riots in Watts had occurred the previous August and the shock waves were being felt around the cou~try. Although the black population of Riverside at the time was only 6% or 7%, people were ap prehensive. A story appeared in the local paper, The Rzverside Press Enterprzse, about several Blacks who were watching the burning and looting in Watts on TV. One of them, excited by what he saw, ex claimed, "Man-let's burn here, too. " The others in the bar were more level-headed and fortunately dissuaded him from following his impulse. Barely two weeks later, however, someone set fire to one of the build ings of Lowell School, in the eastside ghetto area. Nothing was left of the building but a charred shell. People in Riverside, of all ethnic groups, were generally edgy in the face of a seemingly volatile situation. Agitation by minority parents for improved education for their children seemed to be reinforced by the general unrest.

List of Oral History and Interview Participants -- Notes -- Index

"Busing, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Examining battles over school desegregation in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, [this book posits that] school officials, politicians, courts, and the news media valued the desires of white parents more than the rights of black students, and how antibusing parents and politicians borrowed media strategies from the civil rights movement to thwart busing for school desegregation"--Provided by publisher.