Research

Historians often interpret school desegregation debates through one of two narratives. “Unfinished struggle” narratives see school desegregation as a noble, yet derailed struggle for educational equality. Such stories support a higher constitutional standard to tackle the broad array of interlocking state actions that produced America’s geography of racial segregation and view greater integration as a necessary or, at the least, the most effective strategy to improve equality of opportunity. On the other hand, “misguided struggle” narratives almost exclusively praise Brown’s requirement for formal non-discrimination, but often view reassignment (“busing”) policies as federal overreach that created counter-productive, unintended consequences such as white flight out of center-city districts, the violation of community-based schooling, and long bus rides for both white and black students. 

But how well do these narratives apply to contemporary student assignment and education reform deliberations that continue to take place in school districts across the country? Such contemporary debates occur today under very different circumstances, without court and federal government involvement, with a wider range of education policy and reform ideas on the table, often with greater local minority political influence, and after substantial time has elapsed between both de jure discrimination and desegregation remedies.

This dissertation examines 1990s Durham, North Carolina as a unique and informative case study where a local community tackled the role of integration policies for educational equality in a political context that more closely corresponds to our contemporary historical moment. Durham’s debate was a community conversation about the effectiveness of integration strategies, the inherent tensions within such efforts, and how integration fit within a new constellation of educational ideas and priorities. 

Thus, the Durham case can move us away from existing frameworks that offer binary perspectives on integrationist policies, and open up space for more stories of how local coalitions built on a long history of Left thought to pursue a wide range of policy ideas. This reframing can inform contemporary debates about the proper role of integrationist policies in educational fairness and open up space to create more effective and more just student assignment policy.