Desegregation
Desegregation
Although Brown is rightly celebrated as an epic civil rights milestone, its lasting influence on educational equality is less clear. This chapter explores African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American struggles for more equitable and integrated schools after 1954. It also considers how and why people of color sometimes pursued alternatives to integration, such as community control, in hopes of attaining both educational equality as well as other goals like self-determination and community empowerment. We emphasize the tremendous educational victories in the post-Brown era while acknowledging that school desegregation did not achieve the intent of equalizing educational opportunities for all students of color. Chapter 2 emphasizes three key findings: first, that white citizens, often unapologetically, opposed school integration and equalization measures from 1954 to the present; second, that improvements in public education were a direct result of sustained educational activism by communities of color; and third, that over time educational activists developed multiple nuanced conceptions of school integration as one possible tactic, among many, to equalize public education. This long history of educational activism and the multiple visions of school integration that came out of it, provides crucial lessons for how to revive public education today.
Keywords: institutionalized racism, white resistance, community control, racial justice, civil rights, educational activism, educational equality, integration, school desegregation
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