Traditional narratives of black educational history suggest that African Americans offered a unified voice concerning Brown v. Board of Education. Jack Dougherty counters this interpretation, demonstrating that black activists engaged in multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting strategies to advance the race by gaining greater control over schools. Dougherty tells the story of black school reform movements in Milwaukee from the 1930s to the 1990s, highlighting the multiple perspectives within each generation. In profiles of four leading activists, he reveals how different generations redefined the meaning of the Brown decision over time to fit the historical conditions of their particular struggles. William Kelley of the Urban League worked to win teaching jobs for blacks and to resettle Southern black migrant children in the 1950s; Lloyd Barbee of the NAACP organized protests in support of integrated schools and the teaching of black history in the 1960s; and Marian McEvilly and Howard Fuller contested--in different ways--the politics of implementing desegregation in the 1970s, paving the way for the 1990s private school voucher movement. Dougherty concludes by contrasting three interpretations of the progress made in the fifty years since Brown, showing how historical perspective can shed light on contemporary debates over race and education reform.

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery. Before Busing tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city—a fight that continues to this day.

"Milwaukee's story is unique in that its struggle for integration and quality education has been so closely tied to [school] choice." --from the Introduction "Educating Milwaukee: How One City's History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped Its Schools" traces the origins of the modern school choice movement, which is growing in strength throughout the United States. Author James K. Nelsen follows Milwaukee's tumultuous education history through three eras--"no choice," "forced choice," and "school choice." Nelsen details the whole story of Milwaukee's choice movement through to modern times when Milwaukee families have more schooling options than ever--charter schools, open enrollment, state-funded vouchers, neighborhood schools--and yet Milwaukee's impoverished African American students still struggle to succeed and stay in school. "Educating Milwaukee" chronicles how competing visions of equity and excellence have played out in one city's schools in the modern era, offering both a cautionary tale and a "choice" example.

When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

The Struggle for Black Equality is a dramatic, memorable history of the civil rights movement. Harvard Sitkoff offers both a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of civil rights organizations and a compelling analysis of the continuing problems plaguing many African Americans. With a new foreword and afterword, and an up-to-date bibliography, this anniversary edition highlights the continuing significance of the movement for black equality and justice.

The third volume —the book that made Karl Ove Knausgaard a phenomenon in the United States—in the addictive New York Times bestselling series, My Struggle. A family of four—mother, father, and two boys—move to the south coast of Norway, to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory is upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Karl Ove Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, My Struggle: Book 3 gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.

Not one but two civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth century Texas, and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than integration and access: they demanded power and justice. Civil Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge metropolises—both the everyday grind of segregation and the haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas’s state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve self-determination.