Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City by Ruth Carbonette Yow (review)

By the mid-1970s, Marietta High School in Cobb County, Georgia, had achieved many of the loftiest goals of Brown vs. Board of Education: the makeup of its student population mirrored the population of the city at large, and their ethos of "colorblind comradery" was as central to the school's identity as its Blue Devil football team. But today, the demographics of Marietta High are shifting once again, and like many school systems in the United States, the Marietta district is resegregating.

In Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, author, education scholar, and native Georgian Ruth Carbonette Yow approaches what is happening in Marietta as a case study for national trends in education and calls for a new integration movement, necessitated primarily by the limitations of the first: "The fight for integration today must encompass growing populations of immigrant students, especially those who are undocumented" (8). For Yow, this is not merely a question of altruism, but a necessary safeguard for the future health of the community. As she explains, "An integration movement that does not encompass whole communities will not serve the needs of the coming generations, generations that will be increasingly Latino" (8).

The clarity of her call and the specificity of her vision are among the greatest strengths of the book. Within the first dozen pages, Yow offers both a historical context for the situation in Marietta and an outline of some of the most pressing issues the new movement will need to address—among them, endemic discrimination, mass deportation, and crippling poverty. But before we can proceed with designing this more nearly perfect movement, Yow argues we must first look to the past to show how integration became institutionalized, "how students, teachers, activists, and community members have understood the stakes of integration and [how they have] translated that knowledge into school reform, city legislation, and collective action" (8). Amid all these objectives, however, her ultimate call for a new integration movement occasionally gets lost, making the text feel somewhat disjointed. In the introduction, Yow confesses, "I was often challenged to define my agenda, by everyone from the superintendent of schools—'What is the question you're trying to answer?'—to the high school students I volunteered with—'So, um, why are you here?'" (17). But she never quite explains her agenda—or maybe she does, and it is just not clear or direct enough to feel cohesive.

Instead, Yow builds her argument by breaking it down to examine the arc of desegregation through four different lenses, each representing one of the school's key arenas—varsity sports, school choice, academic tracking, and social activism. In an attempt to move beyond the statistics that dominate traditional education discourse, Yow charts personal histories alongside national conversations about race, class, and citizenship to show how public policy affects the lived experience of education reform and to illuminate where the last desegregation movement fell short.

Over the course of two years, she interviewed over a hundred community members—including teachers, students, school board members, and education activists—whose testimony spans five decades of Marietta High School history. Yow uses the testimony to add humanity and dimension to the conversation, but unlike traditional oral history work, the testimony is neither the basis for her arguments nor the subject of her analysis. When, on rare occasion, she does analyze the testimony, the methodology is deployed unevenly and with questionable outcomes. There is a sense that Yow believes some people mean what they say and remember things accurately (namely, the ones whose testimony fits within the scope of her thesis), while others may reflect some unseen bias (usually the ones whose testimony does not fit). It is important to note, however, that Yow never claims to be writing an oral history text. Instead, she describes Students of the Dream as a "historical ethnography," meaning it combines oral history with ethnographic methods—categorically ambiguous but nevertheless tremendously...