Highlighting the processes and missteps involved in creating and carrying out school desegregation policies in Chicago, Dionne Danns discusses the challenges of using the 1964 Civil Rights Act to implement school desegregation and the resultant limitations and effectiveness of government legislative power in bringing about social change.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This report of an advisory panel to the Chicago Board of Education deals with desegregation of the public schools, and offers a plan ""by which any educational, psychological, and emotional problems or inequities in the school system"" can be removed. The introduction deals with historical and legal background and the problem of integration in a pluralistic society; a summary of the Panel's findings, recommendations with their rationale; and a general discussion of implementation. The panel's findings on de facto segregation are discussed in relation to racial composition of student body (schools are defined as integrated when they are at least 10% Negro and 10% white), and the racial distribution of teachers. Quality of Education in white, integrated, and Negro schools is discussed in terms of overcrowding; class size; student-staff ratio; teaching staff; attendances; dropouts and mobility; achievement; curriculum and teaching methods; and physical facilities. Recommendations, based on the currently accepted premises about the value of desegregation, stress that the principle of the neighborhood school must be modified to achieve the ""higher priority"" of expanding ""the freedom of individual choice."" Appendices include policy statements, social-psychological material on segregation, and tables of data on which recommendations were based. A study guide for the report is included. (Nh).

List of Oral History and Interview Participants -- Notes -- Index

Scholars have long explored school desegregation through various lenses, examining policy, the role of the courts and federal government, resistance and backlash, and the fight to preserve Black schools. However, few studies have examined the group experiences of students within desegregated schools. Crossing Segregated Boundaries centers the experiences of over sixty graduates of the class of 1988 in three desegregated Chicago high schools. Chicago’s housing segregation and declining white enrollments severely curtailed the city’s school desegregation plan, and as a result desegregation options were academically stratified, providing limited opportunities for a chosen few while leaving the majority of students in segregated, underperforming schools. Nevertheless, desegregation did provide a transformative opportunity for those students involved. While desegregation was the external impetus that brought students together, the students themselves made integration possible, and many students found that the few years that they spent in these schools had a profound impact on broadening their understanding of different racial and ethnic groups. In very real ways, desegregated schools reduced racial isolation for those who took part.

"Busing, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Examining battles over school desegregation in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, [this book posits that] school officials, politicians, courts, and the news media valued the desires of white parents more than the rights of black students, and how antibusing parents and politicians borrowed media strategies from the civil rights movement to thwart busing for school desegregation"--Provided by publisher.

The definitive account of Louis Armstrong—his life and legacy—during the most creative period of his career. Nearly 100 years after bursting onto Chicago’s music scene under the tutelage of Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. A trumpet virtuoso, seductive crooner, and consummate entertainer, Armstrong laid the foundation for the future of jazz with his stylistic innovations, but his story would be incomplete without examining how he struggled in a society seething with brutally racist ideologies, laws, and practices. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields his own tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives across the page. Through Brothers's expert ears and eyes we meet an Armstrong whose quickness and sureness, so evident in his performances, served him well in his encounters with racism while his music soared across the airwaves into homes all over America. Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism blends cultural history, musical scholarship, and personal accounts from Armstrong's contemporaries to reveal his enduring contributions to jazz and popular music at a time when he and his bandmates couldn’t count on food or even a friendly face on their travels across the country. Thomas Brothers combines an intimate knowledge of Armstrong's life with the boldness to examine his place in such a racially charged landscape. In vivid prose and with vibrant photographs, Brothers illuminates the life and work of the man many consider to be the greatest American musician of the twentieth century.