The Semantics of Segregation: Discursive Struggles over School Desegregation Reform in Civil Rights Era Chicago

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Perspectives Through History and Memory

Abstract

For many large U.S. cities outside the South, a political drama unfolded around racially segregated schooling during the 1960’s and 1970’s. While existing accounts focus on the success and failure of desegregation initiatives in the face of staunch white resistance and the threat of white flight, the politics of school desegregation also reflected an underlying discursive struggle over the significance of segregated schooling—its causes, its effects, and the intended purpose of desegregation reform. Investigating the case of the Chicago Public Schools, this paper argues that a leading group of local school officials and allied white reformers collectively crafted a desegregation agenda that contradicted the empirical and political claims of the very black activists who forced desegregation onto the public agenda. Eschewing the demands of black protest and frustrating black and white constituents calling for sensible reforms, public officials framed the problem of student segregation as incidental effect of neighborhood demographic trends while avoiding any explicit confrontation with the concrete challenges facing black education. Drawing on and supporting this characterization was a parallel yet separate depiction of racially disparate school outcomes as a natural consequence of the economic and cultural status of black families. Scholars have pointed to official silence surrounding acts of racial exclusion and displacement in 1940’s and 1950’s Chicago, and this paper contends that official desegregation proposals functioned within a subsequent effort to deny the legitimacy of black political claims for structural reform and redress of chronic inequalities.

Author

• Fithawee Tzeggai, Univ of California Berkeley