Wilkinson's incisive history of the Supreme Court's halting role in integrating education focuses on the two most controversial Supreme Court decisions of this generation and the country's reaction to them.

Wilkinson's incisive history of the Supreme Court's halting role in integrating education focuses on the two most controversial Supreme Court decisions of this generation and the country's reaction to them.

Wilkinson's incisive history of the Supreme Court's halting role in integrating education focuses on the two most controversial Supreme Court decisions of this generation and the country's reaction to them.

In The House I Live In, award-winning historian Robert J. Norrell offers a truly masterful chronicle of American race relations over the last one hundred and fifty years. This scrupulously fair and insightful narrative--the most ambitious and wide-ranging history of its kind--sheds new light on the ideologies, from white supremacy to black nationalism, that have shaped race relations since the Civil War. Norrell argues that it is these ideologies, more than politics or economics, that have sculpted the landscape of race in America. Beginning with Reconstruction, he shows how the democratic values of liberty and equality were infused with new meaning by Abraham Lincoln, only to become meaningless for generations of African Americans as the white supremacy movement took shape. The heart of the book paints a vivid portrait of the long, often dangerous struggle of the Civil Rights movement to overcome decades of accepted inequality. Norrell offers fresh appraisals of key Civil Rights figures and dissects the ideas of racists. He offers striking new insights into black-white history, observing for instance that the Civil Rights movement really began as early as the 1930s, and that contrary to much recent writing, the Cold War was a setback rather than a boost to the quest for racial justice. He also breaks new ground on the role of popular culture and mass media in first promoting, but later helping defeat, notions of white supremacy. Though the struggle for equality is far from over, Norrell writes that today we are closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of our democratic values. The House I Live In gives readers the first full understanding of how far we have come.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones?In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s--including school finance litigation, school choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act--have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Ryan closes by suggesting innovative ways to promote school integration, which would take advantage of unprecedented demographic shifts and an embrace of diversity among young adults.Exhaustively researched and elegantly written by one of the nation's leading education law scholars, Five Miles Away, A World Apart ties together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. It will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why our schools are so unequal and whether there is anything to be done about it.

In Confronting the Color Line, Alan Anderson and George Pickering examine the hopes and strategies, the frustrations and internal conflicts, the hard-won successes and bitter disappointments of the civil rights movement in Chicago. The scene of a protracted local struggle to force equality in education and open housing for blacks, the city also became the focus of national attention in the summer of 1966 as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference challenged the entrenched political machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The failure of King's campaign--a failure he would not live to redeem--marked the final unsuccessful attempt to secure significant social change in Chicago, and soon afterward the national civil rights movement itself would unravel amid white backlash and cries of black power. Picking up the threads of our own recent history, Confronting the Color Line examines a political movement that remains unfinished, a dilemma for America's system of democratic social change that remains unsolved.