Integrated How American schools failed Black children

The school integration attempts that followed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education did more to hurt Black children than to help them, according to this illuminating study from Rooks (A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit), the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Drawing on a range of sociological and archival data, Rooks describes "the trauma Black students suffered" due to integration--not just the havoc caused by many school districts' attempts to resist desegregation (one Virginia county famously closed all its schools rather than comply), but the disruption Black students experienced when their own schools shuttered (many districts that complied did so by closing Black schools and reassigning the students to white schools) and they were thrust into environments where they were exposed to racism from white classmates and teachers. She also draws an astute through line between school integration and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline, arguing that white students' and teachers' racist fear of Black students is what jump-started it. Rooks concludes by spotlighting the "community school" model pioneered by the Black Panthers--which has recently had a successful relaunch in Oakland, Calif.--that emphasizes the democratic engagement of the local community, and which, Rooks argues, has the power to promote integration organically via "collective buy-in": "If communities allow it, integration works," she writes, but only when all community members feel engaged. The result is a paradigm-shifting reassessment of a milestone of the civil rights movement. (Mar.)

Far from the dream of educational equality. Rooks eloquently begins: "I believe a morning will come when we as a nation will collectively toast our wrestled defeat of inequitable education….Before that future can find us, we who believe that educational equality is a requirement for healthy democracy will need to fully acknowledge the failure of the dream of shared access to resources and institution governance that was to have been complete integration." The book charts the history of that failure, from the founding of the republic to the present day. It offers individual stories of segregation and--after theBrown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools--resistance to integration. These historical narratives intertwine with personal accounts of the author's own family during these times. Taken together, they create a vivid account of the emotional and economic damage done to generations of children of color. They sustain the position that systemic racism, rather than individually focused discrimination, often motivates institutional inequality. But, in the end, this is a book of people rather than laws and institutions. It shows that Black families were not, in fact, unanimous in their support of theBrown decision; there was dissent and disagreement about how best to serve communities and allocate resources. While the author does not support a pre-Brown world, she does celebrate the older, Black structures of belonging--the church, the school, and the community. The goal of this book is, as the author concludes, to "find another way" beyond our present systems to make education available with equal resources and equal impact to children of all socioeconomic and ethnic groups in America. Rich with statistics and historical narrative, the book comes fully alive when the author writes about her son's struggles as a Black child in an exclusive white school system and about her challenges as a Black professor in the Ivy League. A powerful and uncompromising indictment of the public school system. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.