George W. Noblit 
School Desegregation 
Oral Histories toward Understanding the Effects of White Domination

This book is written for the Millennial Generation to educate them about what school desegregation was actually about—the struggle over white domination in the United States. The textbooks they read as high school students describe the heroic efforts of African Americans to achieve civil rights but do not describe who was denying them these rights—white Americans. The oral histories in this book reveal how individuals navigated efforts to achieve educational equity amidst efforts to reassert white domination. These accounts counter the textbook history the Millennial Generation read which omits the massive white resistance to school desegregation, the various ways whites used subterfuge to slow down and redirect school desegregation in what would more benefit whites, and the concerted white political backlash that has been ensconced in educational policy and reform beginning with A Nation at Risk and continuing in No Child Left Behind. That is, educational policy as we know it is all about asserting white domination and not about educating children, and thus the Millennial Generation is faced with undoing what their parents and grandparents have done.

Table of Content

Preface; Prologue: “I Began to See”: Barbara Lorie on School Desegregation; Introduction: School Desegregation and White Domination; Part 1: The Shift to Desegregated Schools; Remembering Pre- and Post-Desegregation in Northeastern North Carolina; Educational Apartheid in Macon/Bibb County, Georgia: An Oral History of Desegregation and Resegregation; Segregation and Desegregation in Parsons, Kansas: Memories of Douglass School 1908–1958 – Narrative of Marietta Smith; A Historically Black High School Remains Intact: We Weren’t Thinking about White Students; Part 2: Student Experiences; The Final Days of Douglass School: The Narrative of Andrew “Chip” Johnson; Dan Edwards Remembering Desegregation in Tampa: Introduction and Commentary by Barbara J. Shircliffe; Educational Apartheid in Macon/Bibb County, Georgia: An Oral History of Desegregation and Resegregation, Part II – Alethea’s Story; Marilyn Matthiew: Remembering Desegregation in Tampa: Introduction and Commentary by Barbara J. Shircliffe; Just Let Them Have the School: A White Student’s Perspective of School Desegregation; Part 3: Implementation and Administration of Desegregated Education; Ambivalence, Angst, and Hope: Black Principals in Mississippi; “It’s Time to Make Things Right”: Symbolic Order and the Limits of Imagination; Implementing the “Law of the Land”: White Superintendents in Mississippi; Conclusion: White Backlash and Educational Reform – Then and Now; Contributors.