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114 AMY STUART WELLS, JACQUELYN DURAN, & TERRENDA WHITE Southern Graduates of School Desegregation A Double Consciousness of Resegregation yet Hope Recent research on the graduates of school desegregation explores the complicated relationship between how individuals were fundamentally changed by their educational experiences in racially diverse schools and, paradoxically , how little our racially divided society has changed since they were in school, making their adult lives far more segregated.1 In other words, the story of school desegregation’s graduates illustrates how the dismantling of racial segregation within the public schools was intended to be only one part of a broader social reform. Yet many other parts of that reform, including the War on Poverty, serious fair-housing enforcement, and policies to revive urban communities, were never implemented or quickly abandoned.This meant the burden of transforming a racially polarized society was placed almost entirely on public schools and their desegregation policies.2 Schools alone could not do this, although they did have a strong impact on those who attended them during that era. Echoing findings from the quantitative survey data on school desegregation and racial attitudes, this in-depth, qualitative research finds that most graduates of desegregation say their experiences in racially diverse schools made them more comfortable in their interactions with people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. They compare themselves to spouses, friends, and siblings who attended more racially isolated schools and who are far less at ease around people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, however, school desegregation in and of itself did not change the still segregated and unequal larger society into which these graduates matriculated to buy homes, get jobs, and rear their own children. When they were in high school, the graduates believed their desegregated public schools were preparing them for a “real world” that would be more racially integrated and equal. When they graduated, however, they learned that in fact this was not the case. Most of their adult lives were lived under presidential administrations and federal courts that were dismantling major parts of the civil rights revolution, including school desegregation. While the SOUTHERN GRADUATES OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION 115 public schools they attended were part of a bold effort in the field of education —both court-imposed and voluntary—to bring people together across color lines, little had occurred in the other sectors of society to prepare for a generation of graduates who, because of their schooling experience, were more open to living in racially diverse neighborhoods, churches, and workplaces than prior generations. As one graduate of school desegregation aptly described this phenomenon, it was as if the public schools were at the forefront of the first phase of desegregation, but that beyond this, there was no “second gear” for the civil rights movement, which required other institutions to follow suit. And while more progress has been made in the employment sector to diversify workplaces than in the housing sector to integrate neighborhoods , even at work, the graduates of desegregation say their offices are stratified by race, with whites generally in charge of lower-paid employees of color.3 Nowhere was this lost momentum of the civil rights movement and racial desegregation felt more strongly than in the South, where high school graduates of the 1980s recognized that through their participation in school desegregation , they helped rewrite the history of what had always been a rigidly segregated society with de jure segregation and massive white resistance to civil rights. Furthermore, only in the South were large-scale increases in the levels of school integration achieved and sustained for several decades. In recalling the racial tension and violence that symbolized the breakdown of a formal system of racial apartheid, the southern graduates clearlydistinguished themselves from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations and thus saw themselves as central to the development of a “new” forward-looking South. Believing they had been somewhat successful in this endeavor by the time they left high school, which most of them did, they were filled with a great sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Similarly, their later understanding that they, as former high school students, had moved further toward embracing an integrated society than most people or institutions in the South contributed to their even deeper sense of the lost momentum related to these issues after graduation. A sense of “double consciousness”—or a “twoness” as W. E. B. Du Bois4 would have referred to it—emerges from these graduates’ frustration from being both prepared for a...

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