Throughout the nation's history, from before the Civil War through Reconstruction, across the years of lynchings and segregation to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the battles over busing, no issue has divided the American people more than race, and at the heart of the race issue has been the conflict over school segregation and desegregation. Prior to the Civil War, South Carolina enacted the first compulsory illiteracy law, which made it a crime to teach slaves to write, and other Southern states soon followed South Carolina's example. After the Civil War, schools for blacks were founded throughout the South, including many Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision established the principle of separate but equal education, which led to decades of segregation. With the 1954 Brown decision, the Supreme Court overturned the separate but equal principle, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 empowered the federal government to affect school desegregation. The process of desegregation continues to this day, with much debate and mixed results. Through more than 260 alphabetically arranged entries, this comprehensive reference book describes persons, court decisions, terms and concepts, legislation, reports and books, types of plans, and organizations central to the struggle for educational equality. The volume covers topics ranging from emotionally laden terms such as busing to complex legal concepts such as de facto and de jure segregation. Each entry includes factual information, a summary of different viewpoints, and a brief bibliography. The book includes an introduction, which outlines the history of school segregation and desegregation, along with a chronology and extensive bibliographic material. Thus this reference is a complete guide to school segregation and desegregation in elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States.

The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefining the United States. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement is a guide to the history of the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. The history of this period is covered in a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, significant legal cases, local struggles, forgotten heroes, and prominent women in the Movement. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement.

This book examines the history of the school desegregation movement in St. Louis, Missouri. Underlining the 2014 killing of Michael Brown as a catalyst for re-examination of school desegregation, Rias delves into the connection between contemporary school segregation and social justice, probing the ways that “soft racism”—a term the author uses to describe the non-violent, yet equally harmful, types of protests that opponents of desegregation utilized—has permeated St. Louis since the days of Brown v. Board of Education. The chapters feature the voices of those who were central to the desegregation fight in St. Louis, showing how the devastating effects of school segregation and soft racism linger today.

An acclaimed economist reveals that school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful -- and argues that we must renew our commitment to integration for the sake of all Americans We are frequently told that school integration was a social experiment doomed from the start. But as Rucker C. Johnson demonstrates in Children of the Dream, it was, in fact, a spectacular achievement. Drawing on longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not -- and this held true for children of all races. Yet as a society we have given up on integration. Since the high point of integration in 1988, we have regressed and segregation again prevails. Contending that integrated, well-funded schools are the primary engine of social mobility, Children of the Dream offers a radical new take on social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.

Examines the results of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision on desegregation on the five school districts that participated in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and argues that the Court erred in moving beyond a policy of desegregation to one of integration.

Between North and South chronicles the three-decade-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction. Historian Brett Gadsden begins by tracing the origins of a long litigation campaign by NAACP attorneys who translated popular complaints about the inequities in Jim Crow schooling into challenges to racial proscriptions in public education. Their legal victories subsequently provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, marking Delaware as a center of civil rights advancements. Gadsden's further examination of a novel metropolitan approach to address the problem of segregation in city and suburban schools, wherein proponents highlighted the web of state-sponsored discrimination that produced interrelated school and residential segregation, reveals the strategic creativity of civil rights activists. He shows us how, even in the face of concerted white opposition, these activists continued to advance civil rights reforms into the 1970s, secured one of the most progressive busing remedies in the nation, and created a potential model for desegregation efforts across the United States. Between North and South also explores how activists on both sides of the contest in this border state—adjacent to the Mason-Dixon line—helped create, perpetuate, and contest ideas of southern exceptionalism and northern innocence. Gadsden offers instead a new framework in which "southern-style" and "northern-style" modes of racial segregation and discrimination are revealed largely as regional myths that civil rights activists and opponents alternately evoked and strategically deployed to both advance and thwart reform.

Covers the people, court cases, historical events, and terms relating to one of the most studied political documents in schools across the country, the United States Constitution.