Separate, but Not Equal: The Dream and the Struggle

A moving history of the struggle of African-Americans for equal education rights from colonial times to the present, from the award-winning author of over eighty nonfiction books for young readers.

VOYA

This book provides a concise, readable history of African American education from Colonial times to the present. Haskins begins with nine black teenagers' attempt to integrate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957--an action opposed by angry mobs, National Guardsmen, and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. The question then raised is why were people so bent on denying equal education to African Americans? This leads to a discussion of the history of black education, covering Colonial blacks like Phyllis Wheatley, who was educated despite restricted opportunities; pre-Civil War slave codes forbidding blacks to learn to read and write; the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which granted blacks certain basic rights of citizenship; the establishment of Jim Crow laws whose purpose was to deny those rights; and the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that schools could be separated as long as they were "equal." The following chapters deal with legal efforts by black lawyers like Thurgood Marshall to overturn Plessy and its "separate but equal" philosophy. The climax of this movement occurred in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (four school desegregation cases joined together--each case detailed in separate chapters) that schools separated by race are inherently unequal. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s and 1990s that set back integration efforts by ending busing and other desegregation activities are also covered. The short and topical chapters aid the researcher in finding pertinent information, and there is good use of direct quotes from individuals and primary resource materials. The chronology is not just a rehash of information from the book, but contains additional material and statistics. Haskins has written a valuable addition for all junior and senior high school libraries. Index. Illus. Photos. Biblio. Further Reading. Chronology. VOYA Codes: 4Q 2P J S (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses, For the YA with a special interest in the subject, Junior High-defined as grades 7 to 9 and Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).