An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North

Montclair State University education professor Burkholder (Color in the Classroom) delivers an eye-opening history of school integration in the North from the 1840s to the present-day. Focusing on debates within the African American community over the benefits of integration versus separate, Black-controlled schools, Burkholder details how efforts by Blacks in the antebellum North to gain access to public schools “morphed into a state-sponsored system of racially segregated and unequal education,” leading Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists to view school integration as essential to their movement. However, amid rising racial tensions sparked by the influx of freed people to Northern cities after the Civil War, Black educational leaders including Cincinnati’s Peter H. Clark argued that integrated schools, which were typically controlled by white officials, lacked compassion for Black students and made it difficult for Black teachers to find work. Drawing sympathetic portraits of Black activists on both sides of the issue as it unfolded through the ensuing decades, Burkholder delves into the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, white flight, opposition to school busing, the introduction of Afrocentric curricula by “community control” activists in the 1960s, and the rise of charter schools. This fine-grained survey adds crucial perspective to a long-simmering social issue. (Aug.)