"My goal is to show the personal and national consequences of an educational justice arc that bent from segregated to de segregated and then back again and to explore the psychic price of experiencing, surviving, or failing to survive integration on communities, politics, and children. The sum of the debt owed may remain forever unknown, but I know the price is high."
In her alarming, mind blowing, and ❤️ breaking Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children Noliwe Rooks shows how Brown v Board of Education (1954) did not issue in a time of educational equity utopia. Rather the system evolved to maintain white supremecy and privilege. Black children, teachers, families indeed paid an unconscionably cruel price.
First of all it put a lot of kids in danger. In some places there were so many irate, venomous whites swarming the school it took the National Guard or even the Army to get the Black kids in and out. The pictures are horrific. School systems were shut down with funds that were supposed to go to public education getting siphoned off for private white only academies. Even schools that integrated put Black and white students on totally different academic tracks.
Most Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs. Black schools were shut down. Black teachers were also activists who fought for their students and taught them they mattered in a larger world that disagreed. Black schools were community centers. Now teachers were jobless, children were in hostile territory without their champions and communities were bereft.
Rooks traces the consequences--both intended and unintended--of this landmark Supreme Court decision in a well researched and multidimensional narrative, made personal by her inclusion of the experiences of several generations of her family. A lot will leave you horrified and ❤️ broken. But she ends the book with a ray of hope in the form of community schools.
Integrated is a must read for everyone with connections to American public schools.
On a purrrsonal note, we're now in finals week at UMaine. The campus is in full bloom and totally gorgeous. Yesterday despite the day
long drizzle Eugene and I we went on a road trip. I got a jar of beautiful little 🐚s at a garage sale and the most amazing totally on brand sneakers at an antique shop. Picture tomorrow. I love summer yard sale road trips. I never know what I'll find.
A great big shout out goes out to Eugene, my yard sale treasure hunting partner.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
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