The End of School Desegregation? School Improvement, Integration, and Equal Opportunity in Durham, NC

• In Event: Constructing Possibilities for Advancing the Historical and Contemporary Relevance of Southern Black Educators’ Activism

Abstract

This spatial history connects the politics around student assignment in 1994 Durham, North Carolina with contested ideas about the importance of racial integration in schools and the demographic possibilities of realizing that integration. I focus specifically on how desegregation-focused student assignment policies displaced Black students in very predictable and damaging ways, and forced the Black community to recalibrate its role for school integration in the struggle for social equality. Specifically, Durham’s student assignment debate challenged the idea that school integration is automatically beneficial for Black students. Instead, Black political leaders questioned the educational soundness of particular integration policies and both sides subordinated integration through student assignment policy to a higher goal of educational soundness, effectiveness, and quality.

Author

• Vitaly Radsky, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill