Choosing Equality

by Hayman, Robert L., Jr.; Ware, Leland; Biden, Joe

• ISBN13: 9780271034331
• ISBN10: 0271034335
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-30
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

Summary

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 has long been heralded as a landmark in the progress of civil rights in the United States. But as the forces opposing affirmative action and supporting resegregation have gained ground in recent years, its legacy has been questioned. Some wonder if the decision did more harm than good, by fomenting a backlash, or whether the desegregation it brought about might not have been accomplished anyway through legislation. Others worry about the racial paternalism they see as inherent in the desegregation project and reflected in the Brown ruling.Choosing Equality includes contributions that give voice to these concerns, yet it provides a strong challenge to this revisionist interpretation. It does so in a unique way, by positioning the issues in the overall national context but focusing on them in the experience of one state, Delaware, that stands as a microcosm of the larger conflict. The State's significance to Brown lies in its contributing two of the five cases that were consolidated in the Court's review of the litigation. But Delaware's own history registered the racial conflict at the heart of the American dilemma: a slave state that fought on the side of the North in the Civil War, it experienced black migration to its cities and the ghettoization that followed but also had black farmers working as sharecroppers next to whites in its southern section. Moreover, while it saw massive resistance to desegregation, it also was the site of one of the largest and most peaceful metropolitan desegregation efforts.This volume offers not only academic analyses of Delaware's experience Brown, set in the broader framework of the debate over its significance at the national level, but also the personal voices of many of the leading participants, from judges and lawyers down to community activists and the students who lived through this important era of the civil rights movement and saw how it changed their future by giving them hope.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
The Context: Race and Segregation	p. 19
A History of Race in Delaware: 1639-1950	p. 21
An Interview with the Honorable Collins	p. 74
Delaware Voices:	p. 91
Annette Woolard-Provine: Remembering	p. 94
Remembering Thurgood Marshall	p. 98
The Difference That Brown Made	p. 104
A Glass Half Full	p. 109
The Experience: Education and Desegregation	p. 117
Educational Equcational Equity and Brown v. Board of Education: Fifty Years of School Desegregation in Delaware	p. 119
Lost Opportunity: The Failure to Integrate Milford's Public Schools in 1954	p. 133
Delaware Voices	p. 162
An Interview with the Honorable	p. 166
The Resegregation Decisions and the New Federalism	p. 182
Delaware Voices	p. 194
The Legacies: Desegregation and Resegregation	p. 199
Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education	p. 201
Haunted by Brown	p. 207
The Centrality of Brown	p. 224
Brown, Social Movements, and Social Change	p. 246
Race and Sex Segregation in Schools Fifty Years After Brown	p. 256
Pre-white and Post-black: The Aesthetics of Oppression	p. 270
Charter Schools in the Context of Brown: Panacea or Faustain Bargaining?	p. 276
Race, Class and Resegregation in Delaware: Delaware Schools Fifty Years After Brown	p. 287
The Geography of Discrimination: The Seattle and Louisville Cases and the Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education	p. 312
Bibliographical Essay	p. 356
About the Contributors	p. 378
Index	p. 380
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