“I Thanked God Right Then and There”

This chapter tells the stories of the Black parents and children who challenged school segregation in the five cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first case, chosen by Thurgood Marshall to show the unequal facilities for Black and White students, came from the small town of Summerton, South Carolina, in which Black children walked to schools in former sharecroppers’ cabins while White children rode buses to schools with four times the funding of Black schools. The next case, in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, began with a strike by Black high school students to protest conditions at their overcrowded schools, where classes were held in unheated tar-paper shacks. The third case challenged segregation in the nation’s capital, led by a Black parent whose daughter was turned away from the all-White junior high nearest her home and sent to an overcrowded all-Black school. The fourth case, from New Castle County, Delaware, began when two Black mothers each protested the inferior schools their children were forced to attend. The final, and most famous, case began in Topeka, Kansas, whose four elementary schools were the only ones segregated in the state, when a father tried to enroll his nine-year-old daughter in the all-White school nearest her home rather than the Black school, a long walk and bus ride away. A federal appeals court cited the Plessy case as binding precedent but almost invited the Supreme Court to overrule it.

The fear of multiple truths: On teaching about racism in a predominantly white school

In a post-truth world, it is imperative for educators to help students sift through the various views of both historical and current events. Critical race theory (CRT), a controversial theoretical framework directly critiquing white supremacy and incorporating the histories of historically marginalized communities, is a useful tool for helping students develop their own understanding of history and the world. However, research shows that social studies educators of white students are unprepared to use CRT. Antony Farag shares his research into white teachers’ use of CRT and describes what happened when his predominately white school attempted to launch an elective course build on critical race theory.

Resistance through Exodus

This chapter suggests that the establishment of private segregationist academies throughout the state was the ultimate form of white resistance to school desegregation. In some school districts, the entire white, school-age population left the public schools in the first few years of desegregation, never to return. However, the varied responses to private schools also demonstrates that the white community was not unified or homogeneous in its beliefs about race, the role of public schools for a strong community, or the personal choices parents should make on behalf of their children's education. Indeed, the public–private school debate divided the white community in some towns, leaving severed friendships and church divisions in its wake.

Love, Hope, and Fear

This chapter addresses the role of teachers in school desegregation. Faculty integration was often the first step a school district took in trying to meet school desegregation orders. A young, recently graduated white teacher would be hired to teach in an all-black school, or a more experienced black teacher would be transferred to an all-white school. When the courts ruled this method of compliance unacceptable, student desegregation then took place. Teachers had to figure out how they and their students could live and learn together in classrooms, cafeterias, halls, bathrooms, locker rooms, and teacher's lounges, where the public and private spheres of people's lives often intersect. Ultimately, many teachers viewed teaching as their calling and were determined to work through school desegregation despite the many obstacles.

Yoshizaka, Takamasa (1917–1980)

Yoshizaka was among the last in a series of Japanese architects to pass through Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier. The son of a diplomat, he was born in Tokyo and educated at Waseda University (1938–1941), teaching there until he was drafted in 1943. In 1950, having been awarded a grant to further his studies in France, he began to assist on two of the most groundbreaking post-war projects, the Unite d’habitation and the Chandigarh capitol. During this time he also embarked on the task of translating Le Corbusier’s Oeuvres Completes, and publicizing writings on the Modulor system in Japanese. His return to Japan witnessed a growing interest in urban planning, collective housing, and artificial land. He joined the last meeting of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne—CIAM) at Otterlo in 1959, becoming a professor at Waseda University in the same year. He espoused the somewhat mystical theory of "discontinuous unity," which sought to address the chaos or diversity of urban life less dismissively. From the mid-1950s he began to attract commissions, including those for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1956) and a number of educational facilities. In these works, he increasingly rejected the pristine internationalism of his contemporaries, pursing more rugged and vernacular approaches, and inspiring the architect and historian Terunobu Fujimori to identify him as the founder of the "Reds" (as opposed to the "White School"), some of whom trained at his Atelier U from 1964.

The Rich Richer and the Poor Poorer

Chapter Seven illustrates the culmination of the tendencies toward combining demands for recognition of class and race based discrimination in the early 1970s. Among a series of other similar cases, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez is a pivotal "taxpayer" case that shut the door on meaningful legal remedies for school inequality. The Rodriguez claimants were low-income children and families of color whose school district was dramatically unequal in comparison to the local, wealthy, white school district in the city. The Court, however, treated the claims of race and class discrimination that the claimants put forward as separate, and ignored the race claim in order to focus on class alone, which they dismissed as a category not entitled to constitutional protection. This chapter argues that the result of Rodriguez was directly tied to the idea that tax status -- and therefore taxable wealth -- was legitimately tied to educational rights and equality. The Court's decision provided an anticommunist rationale for school property tax funding inequality by defending capitalism, economic privacy and local fiscal control against the intersectional claims of race and class inequality.