"Roberts v. City of Boston" is a well-known legal case in the history of US education. In 1847, the Boston School Committee denied Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old African American girl, admission to the public primary school closest to her home. She was instead ordered to attend the all-black Abiel Smith School, about a half-mile walk…

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes,…

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…

This essay examines the first detailed study of gifted African American youth: Lillian Steele Proctor's master's thesis from the late 1920s on Black children in Washington, DC. Unlike formative research on gifted children by educational psychologists, Proctor's investigation emphasized children's experiences at school, home, and community in…

Between 1889 and 1890, John Wilson and his family were among nearly three thousand African American settlers to enter Oklahoma Territory, where Wilson's two daughters first attended an integrated school. The Wilson family was undoubtedly drawn by the educational and economic opportunities that were present in the fluid space--opportunities that…

This article reconstructs the story behind "Freeman v. Pitts" (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

To introduce their examination of the social production of segregated space and power relations in Oxnard, California from 1934 to 1954, the authors utilize portions of a letter written by Alice Shaffer, April 21, 1938, to the Oxnard School Board of Trustees. Shaffer outlines the seemingly shared concerns of her neighbors about a disruption of the…

Studies on northern desegregation have focused on political strategies, the role of the courts, the responsibility of the federal government (HEW), and barriers to northern desegregation. Some have conducted individual case studies and comparative studies, and others have examined a number of cities. This article examines the way school…

Little empirical research has investigated the integration of Canada's Aboriginal children into provincial school systems. Furthermore, the limited existing research has tended to focus on policymakers and government officials at the national level. Thus, the policy shift from segregation to integration has generally been attributed to Canada's…

Examines the historical integration-segregation dilemma from the passage of the first Illinois school law in 1825 to the solidification of the segregation era in the 1930s. Discusses structural impediments to Black students' academic achievement and identifies forces which sought to establish a vocational education caste system for Blacks.…

The history of public higher education for African Americans in Florida provides an excellent opportunity to examine American institutional and political dynamics. Following World War II, Florida public higher education expanded dramatically, while at the same time, state leaders maintained racial segregation well after "Brown v. Board of…

This essay argues that Amherst County citizens and policy makers treated Monacan children differently than white, black, and even other Indian students in Virginia and were determined to keep this particular group of children out of "their" schools and out of "their" community. Even despite federal mandates to do otherwise,…

This essay analyzes the contemporary understandings of, and the aims attributed to, "industrial" education for Africans which came to be strongly associated with "agricultural education" in the Cape Colony between 1890 and 1930. The author first sketches the early history of industrial education from the 1850s to show how this…

In spite of the euphoria of the "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" decision outlawing segregation, Black leaders and presidents of the member colleges of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) understood that this critical point in history brought both opportunities and challenges to Black higher education. The "Brown" decision…