MOBILIZATION AGAINST RESEGREGATION: A History of Resistance in Black Education
This was a 20-page literature review that I wrote and presented on for my sophomore significant contribution through the University Fellows program. I was interested in continuing research on Central High School and wanted to explore the forces that helped shape its narrative.
TL;DR: Listen to kids.
ABSTRACT
Dreams of school desegregation were once met in Alabama, as showcased by the history of Tuscaloosa’s former powerhouse: Central High School. In 2013, though, journalists brought nationwide attention to a nationwide problem: Lifted mandates and backroom deals caused Central High School to split into three “neighborhood” schools, essentially re-segregating the existing district. Now, news reports paint Central High School as a failing school, with a student population that is 99 percent Black.
However, a critical analysis of the local reporting on Central High School indicates that the newsroom may have exacerbated stigmas against the school by perpetuating false and polarizing narratives of Black violence and White success. Instances of this can be found in the local news’ underreporting of crime at the system’s predominantly White school, as well as its underreporting of academic success at the new Central High School. This report first argues that these narratives are not uncommon – they have in fact shaped a White canonical understanding of race, and, if not corrected, they can (and have) shaped reality. Present in the negative spaces of this canon, though, is a web of counter-stories woven by oral histories and remembrance. Mobilization Against Re-Segregation seeks to illuminate these under-reported narratives of Black authority, excellence, and autonomy by examining the legacy of Black student resistance in post-slavery America. By highlighting these histories, from the building of freedmen’s schools to today’s student walkouts, this report urges researchers, reporters, and consumers of media to critically examine the ways in which they write and read about race, education, and – most importantly – students.
My project exemplifies innovation because it argues for a more critical approach to research itself - especially that in the realm of journalism. In Mobilization Against Re-Segregation, I describe how journalism has shaped both positive and negative narratives of Black experience, and I link the problems connected to school segregation to the proliferation of a predominantly White press. Diversity in the newsroom and a more widespread acceptance of traditionally silenced histories - like oral history - can prove to be innovative, if not extremely valuable to the research world.
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As a room of reporters and researchers dined over wine and catered fare, Nikole Hannah-Jones met them with a challenge. At the Education Writers Association’s 2016 awards ceremony, the journalist reached for the mic after receiving kudos for her year-long “Segregation Now” investigation and a series of reports on Black education that followed.
“If you aren’t reporting on school segregation,” she said, “you aren’t doing your job.”
A year later, I sat next to those same reporters, and I listened to them chatter about charters and “innovation” and kindergartners that knew how to code.
What is Re-Segregation?
In her work, Hannah-Jones has argued that de-facto segregation (as opposed to de-jure, or legal segregation) unaddressed by the momentous but underwhelming 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision has led to the re-segregation of American public schools. The decision, which was intended to make school segregation illegal, has been criticized by educational theorists for doing exactly the opposite. Influenced by conservative NAACP members and Whites rather than more radical groups, the Brown decision lacked an affirmative, fastidious solution to segregation. Instead, it was ambiguous, demanding that schools desegregate with “all due deliberate speed.” As a result, some schools did not desegregate until the late sixties, some until the early eighties. This kind of negligence on behalf of the Supreme Court arguably led to later court cases like Milliken vs. Bradley, Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle, and San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez, all of which have set a precedent that White flight (the act of White students fleeing public school systems for “better” educational opportunities in other school zones, private schools, charters, or homeschools), neighborhood schools, and unequal funding were legally justifiable. In his book “Savage Inequalities,” Johnathon Kozol documents the experiences of students in American public schools from 1964-1991. “In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years,” he states in the introduction. Ten years later, his words still ring true. Around the time of Hannah-Jones’ piece, in 2012-13, about 15 percent of the nation’s Black students attended “apartheid schools,” or schools that were at least 99 percent minority (Spencer). Tuscaloosa’s Central High School is now one of these schools, although its namesake used to be a symbol of unity and pride in a newly desegregated system. In her piece, Hannah-Jones documents a series of backroom deals and shifty politics that led to the splitting of Central High School - what used to be an “integrated” mecca for academics and athletics - into three “neighborhood schools.” The “new” Central, which was not built until three years after its more affluent, diverse sister schools, marked its beginning years with insufficient funds, old football jerseys, and a stirring debate over its final location (Rosiek). Placed on the edge of Tuscaloosa’s West Side, Central High School was and is still 99-percent Black and falls victim to six-year reports, each deeming it a “failing school.”
Setting the Record Straight
The story of Central High School is a universal one, and its narrative persists in many ways and for many reasons. In the previous section, I briefly discussed the origins of re-segregation and its continued stories. However, these stories have already been, or are being, told. The problem of re-segregation, then, must not only be addressed by defining injustices in education, but by also criticizing the ways in which we see, study, and report on these injustices.
In this report, I focus on accounts that do not reduce humans to data, or products; I focus on literature that illuminates the lives of people in difficult circumstances and seeks to empower them, and I argue that that should be the goal of every truth-teller. According to critical theorists, it is the job of a journalist to cover the ways that White bias can cloud the minds of not only educators, but both consumers and producers of educational research (Konopak). One of these symptoms of White bias, as outlined by researchers Jerry Rosiek and Kathy Kinslow, is a failure to listen. In a ten-year study of Central’s re-segregation, Rosiek and Kinslow state on page 25 of their book “Resegregation as Curriculum” that this kind of silencing is almost ingrained in the conversations of communities, even by those most negatively affected by it: “…the well-being of the students who would be enrolled in the all-Black school was rarely mentioned by anyone in our study, even those opposed to the restructuring plan.”
This failure to listen, or to qualify the experiences of students, is not of minimal importance; rather, it pervades all forms of life and literature. This phenomenon has a name: Rational theory looks at education through an economic, utilitarian lens, where students are often viewed as “products” and their varied achievements as “goals” in a particular kind of business model. This kind of thought is limiting, however, in that it views education as a stagnant system that does not account for cultural and environmental factors (Heck). We see this time and time again in news stories, where budgets and graduation rates are cited at a much higher frequency than student narratives. Kozol states on page 5 of his book, which is, in some ways, a response to a kind of tradition among researchers: “The voices of children, frankly, had been missing from the whole discussion.”
It is clear that digits and data have become commonplace in educational research and reporting, and it is clear that there is a need for voice. By listening to the voices of those who have historically been excluded from not only public spaces, but the canon itself, I seek to bring color to this conversation. In the case of re-segregation, rational thought transpires in the numbers that tell specifically of Black demise and White progress. Stories of Black mobilization, White resistance, and the social complexities of students are thus left out of the narrative, and this is perpetuated by a long history of choosing a particular kind of history: a history of White bias, and a history of Black silence.
Yet, underneath these stories there remains a long (surviving) history of breaking through that silence.
While we do not care to record mobilization in mainstream media until it is profitable to do so, our history is formed by a series of protests – of mobilizations against segregation, desegregation, and, now, re-segregation. In her book “Self-Taught,” which tells of a series of pre-Reconstruction efforts by freed slaves to secure their own education, Heather Williams comments on this kind of silencing: “African Americans are present in the interstices, in the negative spaces that comprise such a substantial part of the picture” (Williams 2). To come into the positive spaces of literary canons, mainstream media, and Western intellectual thought, then, has been and will always be a challenge for Black student storytellers, unless American citizens work to revolutionize the ways we hear, see, and report our varied and evolving histories.
Black resistance to systematic inequities is an ongoing part of history that has had to fight its way into "positive space," likely because the idea of Black resistance challenges dominant narratives of Black failure and White superiority. Instead, the idea of Black resistance offers a counter-narrative – one of both Black achievement and White hostility – that both acknowledge and defy legacies of White supremacy. I’ll first point to the (survived) history of Black achievement, which is often perceived as a myth in White historical consciousness – a myth that stems from colonialism. While authors like Joseph Conrad paint Africa as a “savage,” unknown land, Sarah Theusen’s Greater Than Equal offers a different perspective: “The African culture from which slaves derived… bore all the marks of an advanced society.” While African monarchies had their own problematic power structures, stories of their relative success are important because they paint a picture of Black excellence, charging that demise was not innate nor inevitable, and that resistance was possible for Black individuals, even once enslaved. This sentiment is echoed, epochs later, by a woman Theuson describes on page 238, who says of the historically Black struggle for quality education: “I been running a long time, I’m not tired yet, and I’m not going to give up.” Protest, in fact, was common among Black students, faculty, and teachers alike. In 1946, 300 Black students in Lumberton exited their school, flooding the streets while holding signs that said, “How can I learn when I’m cold?” (Theuson 168-9), to protest poor learning conditions. Nine days later, “immediate improvements” were promised. In newly “integrated” schools, resistance persisted. In Hickory High School, a White principal suspended six Black cheerleaders for interrupting a football game at which they were not allowed to cheer. At the news of these suspensions, “nearly two hundred black students boycotted school” (Theuson 252). As stories of Black protest and Black achievement moved forward into the Black Power movement, resistance began to take on new forms. Some Black students began to resent integrationist attitudes, most of which did not foresee conditions like those at Hickory High School, where Black students were often subject to racist administration and school policies. In line with the spirit of Black achievement and creating an authentic Black history, then, Black students of the post-civil-rights era began to publicly embrace a Black self-identity. This meant that achievement was tied to protesting against “traditional” (White) ideals of success, as described by college students in Martha Biondi’s Black Revolution on Campus: “They wanted us to pretend we were just like them. We began to see that the Whites weren’t supermen. They were just ordinary cats with ordinary hang-ups. That’s when we stopped assimilating” (Biondi 17). After years of defining Black achievement against White assumptions of Black failure, the notion of Black self-identity began to allow Black students to embrace their unique history, even amidst whispers of White resistance.
At a time when “Birth of a Nation” primed all Black men as rapists in the eyes of fearful Whites, news of slave and freedmen revolts reinforced narratives of Black violence and silenced many (but not all) counter-narratives of Black achievement (66). As a result, White, violent responses to Black resistance were doubly silenced. A few reports that have survived Jim Crow tell of “violent rejections” of public funds to support fledgling Black education, even when poor Whites were welcomed through Black schoolhouse doors (194). These violent rejections were indeed violent, evolving from economic abuse to the physical burnings of Black schools and churches, which were built, usually by Black soldiers, from the ground-up and with little funding. As wood was the only available material, these buildings were not fire-safe like the brick White schools and churches. Though these reports are difficult to find due to discriminant written histories, these counter-narratives of White, violent responses to Black excellence are survived by oral history. Voice, therefore, is the medium through which the forgotten can write their own histories.
It is also worth noting that while this kind of backlash was prevalent in former slave-owning sates, Williams reminds us on page 121 that “Negro hate is not by any means confined to the low south.” In Maryland, burnings continued, Black children and teachers were stoned, and Black guards were placed in doorways to prevent further (White) violence (Williams 45). Whites across the nation had sent a message that, although threatened by Black achievement, the White race would overcome. The term that I use to describe this phenomenon, “Whitelash,” was popularized after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when CNN’s Van Jones attributed the high turnout of poorly educated Republican voters to both the racist remarks made in Trump’s campaign as well as a growing sense of resistance to Black progress (eight years of Obama). Whitelash, then and now, follows Black achievement and seeks to quell it. Sometimes, this creates a silence. However, a (surviving) history of Black resistance – otherwise known as Black canonical resistance – proves to us that this silence has not always prevailed, and that Black individuals are not mere victims of White literary and historical dominance.
As I have previously mentioned, Black history is not always accepted into positive space. Media, then, becomes a judge of Black literary worth. It has the authority to discard Black stories and experiences, and it has done so in the past and in the present. However, as I have made clear from the beginning, Black Americans have written for themselves a legacy of resistance, and that resistance is not limited to educational achievement or survival. That resistance also takes place in the ownership of Black history and a sense of agency in how it is represented.
Scholars like Carter Woodson have admonished others for regarding Black history as a “dispensable luxury” (Theusen 67). In fact, a long (surviving) history has been excavated by historians like Woodson, and it tells of efforts by Black men and women to tell their own stories. I have experienced this in my own line of work, where, in Marion, Alabama, the story of Lincoln Normal School serves as a symbol of Black achievement – a stomping ground of Coretta Scott King, Andrew Billingsley, William Hastie, Jimmie Lee Jackson, and other exceptional students. However, while documenting the school’s history, I noticed that the written archives detailing the school’s life and eventual destruction were not complete. Despite encouragement by a White project manager to “save time” and end my search at the archives, I turned to oral history. Robert Turner, a living alumnus of the school, told me a more complete story of desegregation in Marion, and it goes as follows: Francis Marion High School, which was forced to open its doors to Black students in the 70s, did so by cherry-picking Lincoln’s highest-performing students, leaving the Normal School with no choice but to implement the death sentence that was vocational training. The written history of Lincoln Normal ends in 1970, simply stating that it closed during integration. Lived experience tells otherwise.
But while oral history is an important tool for historians concerned with Black life, textual evidence of the struggle for Black historical legitimacy still exists. The publication of Mis-Education of the Negro was one of many historical texts meant to “revise entrenched historical interpretations” (Theusen 68). Du Bois’ The Crisis and other newspapers sought to create truthful accounts of the present Black experience, which would then turn into history, as is the function of the traditional newspaper. While the White press often perpetuated themes of “White paternalism and Black loyalty” (104), Durham’s Carolina Times and the Charlotte Observer provided an outlet for Black readers and writers to voice their varied concerns on school funding, litigation, and equalization. When many Black community members valued self-determination over reliance on White funds, the Times echoed their concerns: “Crying on the shoulders of White people about the poor condition of Negro schools… will do no good” (Theusen 188). Yet, in the fashion of nearly all instances of Black achievement, advances in the positive space of mainstream media were met with backlash. When a Black educational leader wrote to the Observer, adding to a Black consensus for self-determination, he was demoted from his position and replaced by a White assistant. In the next decade, Black Power protesters were given the media coverage they fought for, “but the images were often unsettling” (Biondi 13), misrepresenting groups with photographs of weapons on front pages of newspapers. However, despite these attempts to silence and misrepresent the stories of Black achievement, the cycle of Black resistance persists. When met with White resistance, surviving histories show Black retaliation. Some protesters were resistant to this kind of media representation and took action to change the narrative, later developing a “sophisticated media strategy that illustrated their commitment to the idea of self-determination. Fearing that the mainstream media would likely misinterpret or distort their actions, they wanted to personally control the framing and dissemination of their story” (Biondi 87).
I detail these specific incidents not because they define segregation or even its evolution into today. I detail these specific incidents because they hint at the persistence of a larger problem: As journalists, as researchers, as educators, and as consumers, we are drowning out the voices of those who seek to tell their own history. And, furthermore, when those histories survive, we fail to acknowledge how they got here. In the next section, I will talk about how history (or a lack thereof) creates a specific kind of consciousness in Black students today, and how we continue to silence their cries for better learning conditions and discredit them when progress is achieved.
In Student Revolution on Campus, Biondi hints at a sense of eternal frustration – a boiling, brewing contempt for a silenced Black history: “People who want to change such institutions have to grab them by the scruff of the neck and yell: ‘Please listen to me.’” Evidenced in the previous section, listening requires an acknowledgement of one’s existence. However, if history fails to speak positively of Black life, then present conversations will echo fictions of the past.
WHAT’S BEEN DONE ABOUT IT
This silence is perpetuated, of course, by media bias. In his dissertation on the possibilities for creating an equitable media landscape, John Pace Konopak speaks of a “spiral of silence,” which he defines as the media’s remarkable power to “limit discourse” and “stifle rival voices.” In the case of Black education, I have indicated that newspapers have both served as a tool and a weapon for these “rival [Black] voices,” some uplifting and some silencing. In his search for a creative solution, Konopak attributes this silence to a dissonance between cultural space (meaning candid stories of Black life, in this case) and the bureaucratic, stifling atmosphere of newsrooms and classrooms alike, where only certain (White) stories are valued. Looking to the future, Konopak envisions a kind of social responsibility in both “pedagogy and the press,” where journalists and educators can form a relationship that facilitates a better understanding of their shared “social and cultural environments” (50).
I am pausing to state a probable solution here because this particular one is built both on eliminating silence and re-envisioning the “public sphere” that creates history, and this solution, I would argue, could very well work. Konopak alludes to the creation of American journalism on page 247: “Thomas Paine's Crisis papers and his Common Sense were circulated among the rebels as broadsides; Paul Revere's first contributions to the revolt were made in his capacity as an engraver of illustrative--often caustically derisive-- plates for the revolutionary press.” This glimpse into history, a told history of White American resistance, furthers Konopak’s argument that the field itself can be revolutionary. Arguably, this revolutionary spirit inspired muckrakers of the 20th century as well as a growing Black press. Today, revolution may require a resistance to the “spiral of silence” and a truthful acknowledgement of Black life on behalf of the mainstream media.” Or, we could look to what is already being done to resist modern, mainstream, corporate media; several non-profit, independent, beat-centered, investigative media outlets have emerged in hopes (as described in many of their mission statements) to actively listen and tell the marginalized stories of marginalized groups. Yet, while progress has been made, Konopak’s true vision has not yet been fulfilled, and there remains evidence that we have a long way to go. So, we must resume by bringing relevancy to the past. Here, I discuss how the silenced stories of contemporary Black education are simply a reiteration of Jim Crow.
A PERSISTING PROBLEM
In Savage Inequalities, which is set at least two decades after Brown, the silence continues among the cries of students. “Why are we treated like this?” one says on page 154. Kozol’s book tracks his trips to schools across the country, where he tries to find that answer. In every classroom and in every state, he finds, students and faculty have come to their own conclusions. Each of these responses are varied, but very few are captured by mainstream media, a force that creates narratives, mainly half-true, to be internalized by Black educators and students. On page 150-52, an administrator speaks of “Going it alone,” in a world where reporters write about his failures but offer no support. “The truth is that we are, to a degree, what you have made of us,” he tells Kozol. What you make of us. This is a riveting quote because it is a direct jab at the kind of work Kozol (a researcher) does, yet Kozol understands that, and by incorporating it in his work, he opens up a kind of self-critique. I pause again to speculate here because those important words from the educator speak volumes about the problem of “talking about problems.” This self-critique, as Konopak suggests, could inspire a sense of social responsibility among those in (and outside of) his field, an act that these very observers of re-segregation have heralded as one of many solutions to a complex problem.
Perhaps more importantly, self-critique can also affect the works of storytellers like Kozol, as the press is blamed again and again for failing to challenge popular, White-centric, rational methodologies. “To some degree I do believe that this [symptoms of re-segregation] is caused by press reports,” said one faculty member on page 35. “Do they show the crimes committed by the government that puts Black people here?” News reports, she contends, are quick to point to Black criminality in high-poverty areas, yet their definitions of “crime” are clouded by White bias. What about stories of fraud, laundering, embezzlement, and other “white collar” crimes? These stories are rarely told in relation to education or other issues falsely designated as the problems of marginalized groups, and the resulting dissonance between news media and Black educators, then, makes it difficult for the truths of their classrooms to be told. A lack of self-critique, mixed with the real-world symptoms of re-segregation, only widen that gulf.
Though some students have internalized these manufactured, distant stories, some resist them in their everyday speak. “It’s quite remarkable how much these children see,” a teacher says on page 105, although noting that “most of them write poorly.” While that teacher may not depict her students as masters of the English language, it is clear that consciousness breeds a special kind of eloquence, and throughout the novel, the voices of children sing: “It’s like a terrible joke on history” one says on page 34, while another crafts a response – concise yet profound – after he learns of the injustice against him: “We have eyes and we have brains” (Kozol 104). Spoken eloquence takes on a written form in one classroom, where Kozol tells of two poems he saw on page 112: “He tried to help the White and black. / Now that he’s dead he can’t do jack,” and “America the beautiful, / Who are you beautiful for?” Poetry is resistance here, where students reclaim their adversities and transform them into the artistry that is unsung blues. This kind of artistic intelligence is unique to segregated schools, because it is one formed by a conscious effort to turn false representation into positive realities.
For younger students, positive narratives of Black life are especially influential. In their innocence lives a clear vision for the future – a vison that mirrors those of the Black soldiers and Black student protesters. “They still believe in that dream,” one teacher says. “They have no reason to do so” (Kozol 30). What changes, then? When does hope change to blues? In her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, pediatric psychologist Beverly Tatum explains the concept of racial consciousness. When students are younger, their race and the social constructions and expectations that come with it are less “salient,” meaning they are less aware of their differences and the injustices attached to difference. In adolescence, though, the student will begin to transition into the “encounter stage,” where they will begin to acknowledge the “personal impact of racism” (Tatum 55). When students begin to reach that stage, as evidenced by middle schoolers in Kozol’s piece, they struggle to make sense of the injustice against them. Considering the confusion that often comes with this transition can help us understand responses such as these: “We’re too young to have the information,” and “They’re not sophisticated, so they speak out of their hearts” (Kozol 179, 182). As shown in the previous paragraph, these students know their realities, but they articulate them in a way that both recognizes and grapples with an emerging racial consciousness.
However, to glorify a teenager’s blues or a child’s innocence without proposing solutions or critiquing our own practices is to create an entirely new kind of trauma, a trauma that comes as a high cost to resistance. On page 186, Kozol speaks of “shell shock” and “battle fatigue,” of “children under siege, always suspicious… fatalistic and impulsive.” When faced with the great adversity of segregated education, it is easy, as Kozol briefly mentions, to look to the positives – the good teachers, the poems, the songs and dances – for consolation. But, as long as our history continues to erase methods of resistance, and as long as our media continues to poorly measure and define injustice, we create a “prescription for despair,” as Tatum describes on page 49, where we “learn to recognize… forms of inequity without also learning strategies to respond to them.” In these situations, it is clear that intelligence and eloquence and consciousness is not a choice, but a tool for survival. “Our children have become wise by necessity,” a teacher says on page 34. A necessity to dispel myths, to know one’s history, and to create a living poetry of resistance.
Just like those in Kozol’s stories, students in Tuscaloosa City Schools know what it means to survive by resisting. Since the school’s conception, Central High School students have expressed a “desire to prove people wrong” (Rosiek 34) about perpetuated stereotypes of criminality brought on by misleading media reports. These reports focused solely on violence at a school that was in a majority low-income area, while its Whiter sister schools in fact had higher suspension and expulsion rates. These stereotypes were reinforced when Central students internalized and responded to their status as members of an all-Black, underfunded, “failing” school. In 2004, 200 students walked out of their classroom in protest, holding signs that said, “Central Students Making History” (Rosiek 2). In their continued, historical fashion, op-eds in the local paper essentially accused students of rabble-rousing, and news reports lacked context. In reality, though, the students were simply “naming what was taking place” and refusing to be passive. They sought to end the debate over the location of their new school and demand that it be placed in the middle of town, as opposed to an isolated corner, where the old pre-Brown Black high school used to be. “Can’t they see what is happening?” one student said. “This is segregation, 2000-style.” Surrounded by discourses from local news that celebrated White success in Northridge and Bryant, Central students resisted (Rosiek 77). These students knew that the reports would never tell (or tell poorly) of their successes; or of their counter stories; or of how they registered 77 18-year-old seniors to vote; or of how they planned protests such as the one in 2004; or of how they attended and were dismissed at school board meetings; or of how they talked about issues that affected them directly; and that this kind of talk was part of everyday conversation – this was their “curriculum.”
It took a national media outlet to even begin to tell these stories. And, yet, local news reporters continue to spout statistic after statistic of a failing Central High. Following the 2016 progress report, which is mandated by No Child Left Behind (a policy criticized by educational theorists for perpetuating stigmas against failing, usually apartheid, schools by requiring that their failures are made public), several Central students flooded social media with the hashtag #CentralBeGreat. Embedded in the posts are iterations of decades of contempt. Contempt for false histories. Contempt for media bias. Contempt for the continuation, the cycle, of injustice and an ongoing struggle to rewrite history. CHS student Ellay Anastasiya posted a video of an alumnus giving a talk at an assembly: “Alvin Garrett came to our school and gave us a little pep talk, seeing that he used to go here..(but people say Central’s students have no positive future…)We have future star football players, artists, doctors, etc at Central because we are great.” Others posted photos of their grades, followed by the hashtag. Most significant, perhaps, is a post by Erskine Simmons, a senior: “IF THE MEDIA DON’T WANNA MAKE NO NOISE….WE GONNA MAKE IT FOR THEM.”
Yet, while the students yell at the top of their lungs, the adults do not listen.
Works Cited
Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus. University of California Press, 2014.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Segregation Now.” ProPublica, 2012, www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools#intro.
Heck, Ronald H. Studying Educational and Social Policy: Theoretical Concepts and Research Methods. L. Erlbaum Associates, 2009.
Konopak, John. “Re-Inventing the Public Sphere: Critical Eory, Social Responsibility, Schools, and the Press.” Https://Digitalcommons.lsu.edu/Cgi/Viewcontent.cgi?Referer=Https://Www.google.com/&Httpsredir=1&Article=5785&Context=gradschool_disstheses, 1989, digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=5785&context=gradschool_disstheses.
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Broadway Paperbacks, 2012.
Rosiek, Jerry, and Kathy Kinslow. Resegregation as Curriculum: the Meaning of the New Segregation in U.S. Public Schools. Routledge Is an Imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business, 2016.
Tatum, Beverly. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about the Development of Racial Identity. BasicBooks, 1997.
Thuesen, Sarah Caroline. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Williams, Heather Andrea. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
