This article examines the impact of African American migration into Kansas City, Missouri, on the city's segregated school system in the 1940s and early 1950s. Substantial increases in the number of African American elementary school-age children produced chronic overcrowding in the segregated black schools, which was not easily relieved due to…

Opportunity hoarding is a sociological concept first introduced by Charles Tilly. This article explores its utility for historians by examining efforts to exclude different groups of people in a major American metropolis during the 1960s and seventies. This was a period of significant social change, as the racial composition of big city schools…

It is difficult to overstate the importance of segregation for race- and ethnicity-based school funding disparities in the United States. In many respects, unequal educational opportunity depends existentially on segregation. Racial and ethnic disparities in wealth accumulation are perpetuated over generations, ensuring persistent segregation even…

The year 1968 denotes a particularly salient moment in American history, not least because it marks the year in which the Civil Rights movement lost its charismatic leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. The assassination of King on April 4, 1968, resulted in widespread and spontaneous uprisings across the country, including one in Kansas City. Not…