In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and…

In this year's Presidential Address, historian Derrick P. Alridge discusses his current research project, Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. The project builds on recent literature about teachers as activists between 1950 and 1980 and explores how and what secondary and postsecondary teachers taught. Focusing on teachers in…

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during…

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a "negro" as a teacher of "white youths." Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an…

Profiles the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the 1930s and 1940s. In this specific instance, the civil rights movement focused on employment for Black teachers (of primarily Black students) within the Milwaukee system. Discusses the various civic, political, and educational organizations involved and their lobbying efforts.…

Each morning, 10 yellow school buses end their circuit through Montclair, New Jersey, to drop off 149 of Renaissance Middle School's 225 students. Community activists, almost forty years ago, had fought long and hard for school integration in this northern town. After court battles, parent meetings, community resistance, and ultimate victory, the…

In spite of the euphoria of the "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" decision outlawing segregation, Black leaders and presidents of the member colleges of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) understood that this critical point in history brought both opportunities and challenges to Black higher education. The "Brown" decision…

This article traces back to the time when virtually no educational research or policymaking takes integration seriously, when the courts regularly declare segregated districts unitary, when the rhetoric of race-blind social justice has been abandoned by the left and appropriated by the opponents of equality. This leads students' and other…