Integrated
How American Schools Failed Black Children
-
- USD 11.99
-
- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF 2025 • A powerful, incisive reckoning with the impacts of school desegregation that traces four generations of the author’s family to show how the implementation of integration decimated Black school systems and did much of the Black community a disservice
"Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history."—The Atlantic
On May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Heralded as a massive victory for civil rights, the decision’s goal was to give Black children equitable access to educational opportunities and clear a path to a better future. Yet in the years following the ruling, schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods were shuttered or saw their funding dwindle; Black educators were fired en masse; and Black children faced discrimination and violence from white peers and educators as they joined resource-rich schools that were reticent to accept the new students.
Award-winning scholar Noliwe Rooks weaves together sociological data, cultural history, and personal records to challenge the idea that integration was a boon for Black children. At once assiduously researched and deeply engaging, Integrated tells the story of how education has remained both a tool for community progress and a seemingly inscrutable cultural puzzle. Rooks’s deft hand turns the story of integration’s past and future on its head and shows how we may better understand and support generations of students to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The school integration attempts that followed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education did more to hurt Black children than to help them, according to this illuminating study from Rooks (A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit), the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Drawing on a range of sociological and archival data, Rooks describes "the trauma Black students suffered" due to integration—not just the havoc caused by many school districts' attempts to resist desegregation (one Virginia county famously closed all its schools rather than comply), but the disruption Black students experienced when their own schools shuttered (many districts that complied did so by closing Black schools and reassigning the students to white schools) and they were thrust into environments where they were exposed to racism from white classmates and teachers. She also draws an astute through line between school integration and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline, arguing that white students' and teachers' racist fear of Black students is what jump-started it. Rooks concludes by spotlighting the "community school" model pioneered by the Black Panthers—which has recently had a successful relaunch in Oakland, Calif.—that emphasizes the democratic engagement of the local community, and which, Rooks argues, has the power to promote integration organically via "collective buy-in": "If communities allow it, integration works," she writes, but only when all community members feel engaged. The result is a paradigm-shifting reassessment of a milestone of the civil rights movement.
