In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 And the children of the white race and the children of the colored race shall be taught in separate public schools; but there shall be no discrimination made in favor of, or to the prejudice of, either race. —Amendment to Article IX of the North Carolina State Constitution, added in 1875 [The Negro’s] educational development may be temporarily retarded by unconstitutional and unchristian legislation, but his citizenship is a fixture. —The Progressive Educator, the organ of the North Carolina Teachers Association, 1888 The new choice, it seems, is between separate but equal [schools] and separate but unequal. —Journalist James Traub, on the occasion of Brown v. Board of Education’s fortieth anniversary, 1994 Introduction Like many children of the post-1960s South, I was first struck as a student of history by the profound difference that one generation can make. My mother began public school in South Carolina in 1943, at the height of racial segregation.When she began her senior year of high school in North Carolina in 1954, the Supreme Court had just ruled “separate but equal” schooling unconstitutional, yet another two decades would pass before the region’s schools desegregated on a meaningful level. By contrast, I began my public school career in North Carolina as levels of school integration were approaching their historic peak. In 1980, the year I completed the first grade, North Carolina could boast of having the most integrated schools in the South and some of the most integrated schools in the nation .Yet not quite two decades later, another sea change was emerging. As journalist James Traub concluded in 1994, “The new choice, it seems, is between separate but equal [schools] and separate but unequal.” Two years later, Time magazine headlined a cover story, “Back to Segregation.” By the end of the decade, Charlotte, North Carolina, was taking center stage in this national debate over the future of school integration. When a 1999 court decision allowed that district to suspend busing plans designed to achieve racial balance, the local schools quickly resegregated.1 By Brown’s fiftieth anniversary in 2004, similar trends could be found across the nation , and countless observers tempered their tributes to the ruling’s architects with data indicating America’s rapid retreat from its goals. 2 / introduction Having once viewed my generation as the first (of presumably many) to attend integrated schools, I began to wonder if we were instead an aberrant blip on the radar of educational history. Indeed, now it seems quite likely that my children, born in 2009 and 2011, will attend a public school system that is legally bound to provide all students with “equal opportunity ” but not necessarily the experience of classroom diversity.2 To be sure, school resegregation has unfolded alongside competing evidence of a more racially inclusive society, including the historic election of the nation’s first African American president and, by a number of measures, the “softening” of white racial attitudes. My children will without question grow up in a nation where race plays a very different role than it did during their grandmother’s—or even their mother’s—childhood. Yet recent litigation surrounding the schools is raising anew once settled questions : Can racially separate schools ever be truly equal? How can equality be measured? Can “separate but equal” schools prepare children for full citizenship? Or, as a forum in a local newspaper asked, “Is Diversity Worth the Effort?”3 Some of the most important answers to those questions derive not from the present but from the past. At a time when policymakers across the country seem to be rehabilitating the notion of separate but equal, I have looked closely at the men and women who understood firsthand both the possibilities and the profound limits of school equalization as a strategy for securing first-class citizenship. In focusing this study on the last decades of segregated schooling in the South, I have explored how black North Carolinians pressed for equalization at the level of curricula, higher education, teacher salaries, and school facilities; how white officials coopted the strategy as a means of forestalling integration; and, finally, how black activism for equalization evolved into a fight for something greater than equal: integrated schools that served as models of both material equality and civic inclusion. These struggles for equality represent much more than a brief detour on the road to Brown. The equalization battle itself had long entailed a goal that was greater than the measurable parity of school...

Share