Description
Book SynopsisBetween North and South chronicles the three-decade-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction. Historian Brett Gadsden begins by tracing the origins of a long litigation campaign by NAACP attorneys who translated popular complaints about the inequities in Jim Crow schooling into challenges to racial proscriptions in public education. Their legal victories subsequently provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court''s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, marking Delaware as a center of civil rights advancements. Gadsden''s further examination of a novel metropolitan approach to address the problem of segregation in city and suburban schools, wherein proponents highlighted the web of state-sponsored discrimination that produced interrelated school and residential segregation, reveals the strategic creativity of civil rights activists. He shows us how, even in t
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"In this provocative and richly detailed study of school desegregation in Delaware, Gadsden provides powerful insights about American history writ large by exposing the artificial binaries that shaped law and politics during the civil rights era: southern versus northern race relations, de jure versus de facto segregation, urban versus suburban boundaries, and even the conservative versus liberal roles in white backlash against court-ordered busing." * Matt Lassiter, University of Michigan *
"Brett Gadsden's Between North and South tells the long history of school desegregation in Delaware-a state whose remarkable role in Brown v. Board of Education is largely forgotten. Gadsden insightfully examines the spatial and political dynamics that shaped the campaign for educational equality during the 1960s and 1970s, an era of backlash against 'forced busing.' In 1974, when courts, legislatures, and citizens across the country turned against school desegregation, Delaware gave rise to the nation's first metropolitan school desegregation remedy. Gadsden makes sense of this anomaly, skillfully explaining what made Delaware different. The book is a must-read for students of race, education, and the law." * Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Bancroft-Prize Winning Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement. *
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I. CHALLENGING JIM CROW
Chapter 1. "There Is a Movement on Foot"
Chapter 2. "He Wouldn't Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus"
PART II. ELIMINATING JIM CROW
Chapter 3. "The Delaware Method of Solving Things"
Chapter 4. "If We Must and Are to Have Integration"
PART III. EXTENDING BROWN'S MANDATE
Chapter 5. "The Other Side of the Milliken Coin"
Chapter 6. "For and Against School Busing"
Epilogue
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
