Analyzes the history and law of school desegregation, including its benefits and costs over the last half decade, and suggests future policy likely to have a better cost-benefit ratio.

In-depth empirical examination of city versus metropolitan schools is a significant addition to the literature on desegregation policy.

In this compelling book, the authors put a human face on desegregation practices in the South. Focusing on an African American community in Alabama, they document not only the gains but also the significant losses experienced by students when their community school was closed and they were forced to attend a White desegregated school across town. This in-depth volume includes: A letter by Dr. William Hooper Councill and speeches by George Washington Trenholm—two African American leaders who worked with communities to provide quality schooling for African American children during segregation.An insider’s view of what life was like inside a segregated African American school—including interviews with graduates who discuss how it felt to be in a caring and nurturing school that provided an atmosphere much like that of a family.Actual events that demonstrate the profound negative impact of using skin color and race as a basis for preferential treatment—including testimonials from parents and students who experienced racial discrimination in their new school. A valuable look at the unmet promises of school desegregation that can help us provide a quality education for all children in the 21st century. “Morris and Morris through their careful research have painted a picture of reality, the type of picture that educators, community leaders, and policymakers must see in order to give a proper assessment of what is going on and what should be done. This clear, straightforward presentation is as necessary as it is powerful.” —From the Foreword by Asa G. Hilliard, III “I found it difficult to put this book down. The Price They Paid is one of the few books that looks at changes in the desegregation of education from the point of view of those living the changes.” —Lucindia H. Chance, Dean, College Of Education, Georgia Southern University

How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. As Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues in this thought-provoking book, within our metropolitan areas we are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school-district boundaries to divide students--and opportunities--along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. Siegel-Hawley takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on evidence from metropolitan school desegregation efforts in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, between 1990 and 2010, Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools both to underscore the damages wrought by school-district boundary lines and to raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear, measurable progress on both school and housing desegregation. Revisiting educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted--or never begun--this book will spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.

A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today's ongoing struggles for equality.

Access to a quality education remains the primary mechanism for improving one’s life chances in the United States, and for children of color, a “good education” is particularly linked to their individual and collective well-being. Despite the popular perception that America is in a “post-racial” epoch, opportunities to access quality learning environments and human development resources remain determined according to race, class, gender, and ability. Taking a more nuanced approach to race and the resegregation of the American school system, this volume examines how and why the education quality for the majority of students of color in America remains fundamentally unequal.

New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.