Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s Graduates

2. Six Desegregated High Schools

39 TWO Six Desegregated High Schools Racial segregation in schools is an institutional complex. The establishment and maintenance of a system of segregated educational facilities depends upon segregation not only of pupils, but of teachers, administrators, politicians, worshipers, and the residential segregation of white parents from Negro parents. Segregated education depends upon and feeds upon segregated churches, segregated businesses, segregated recreational facilities, and segregated neighborhoods. Raymond W. Mack When this passage was written in the 1960s about the politics of nine American communities undergoing school desegregation, this country was just embarking on what many thought was an effort to dismantle the “institutional complex” of racial segregation.1 Yet we learned, forty years after Mack’s book Our Children’s Burden was published, not only that segregated education depends upon segregated communities but also that desegregated schools and their efforts to bring students together are severely limited when the neighborhoods, churches, businesses, and recreational facilities are pulling them apart. These segregated components of the institutional complex that had sustained segregated schools for so long also worked against desegregated schools’ success in fundamental ways. They made it logistically more difficult for students of different races to socialize and interact outside school and also perpetuated a set of beliefs about race and status that profoundly shaped students’ Chapter 02 10/3/08 2:16 PM Page 39 experiences within the schools. The inability of school desegregation policies to consistently accomplish their most ambitious goals is best explained within this larger context by a full consideration of the influence of these other forces. This chapter and the three that follow it describe the social forces that limited the success of desegregation in the schools we studied. Chapters 6 through 9 focus on the graduates of racially mixed schools today and how, despite their appreciation for having attended diverse high schools, most of them remain segregated in much the same way that they did in their lives outside school when they were teenagers. Along the way, from adolescence to adulthood, these graduates developed their own understandings of race and segregation that are double-sided and contradictory . They went to school together in part so that they could learn to get along as adults, but most of them remain far more racially segregated as adults in a manner that speaks to the persistence of racial segregation in every aspect of the institutional complex outside their schools. To write a book that could illustrate this fluid relationship between schools and the larger society, we had to conduct a study that enabled us to see it more clearly. In designing our study we were struck by how little prior research had examined the social context of school desegregation or paid attention to the ways in which the racial inequality that surrounded schools so profoundly affected the daily experiences of their students.2 Thus we set out in 1999 to conduct in-depth case studies of six high schools nestled in six school districts that had undergone some form of desegregation by the late 1970s.3 Our overarching research questions were: How do graduates of racially mixed schools understand their school experience and its effect on their lives—their racial attitudes, educational and professional opportunities, personal relationships, and social networks? And how did the policy context of their experiences shape these understandings? To answer these questions, we knew we needed careful and thoughtful qualitative methods to gather rich and historical data. Given the nature of these questions—to really understand how graduates of desegregated high schools made sense of their experiences and what those meanings were—we knew we could not simply mail out surveys. Thus we set out to examine these schools in 40 s i x d e s e g r e g a t e d h i g h s c h o o l s Chapter 02 10/3/08 2:16 PM Page 40 light of political and historical trends and to conduct lengthy interviews with policy makers and activists in those towns, educators who had worked at these schools during the late 1970s, and at least forty members of the class of 1980 from each site. Our hunch was that to truly understand the effects of school desegregation on a cohort of students who lived through it we had to know something about their local communities . In this chapter we describe our research methodology and each of the towns...