Crossing Segregated Boundaries

Remembering Chicago School Desegregation

By Dionne Danns

SERIES: New Directions in the History of Education

Rutgers University Press

Scholars have long explored school desegregation through various lenses, examining policy, the role of the courts and federal government, resistance and backlash, and the fight to preserve Black schools. However, few studies have examined the group experiences of students within desegregated schools. Crossing Segregated Boundaries centers the experiences of over sixty graduates of the class of 1988 in three desegregated Chicago high schools. Chicago’s housing segregation and declining white enrollments severely curtailed the city’s school desegregation plan, and as a result desegregation options were academically stratified, providing limited opportunities for a chosen few while leaving the majority of students in segregated, underperforming schools. Nevertheless, desegregation did provide a transformative opportunity for those students involved. While desegregation was the external impetus that brought students together, the students themselves made integration possible, and many students found that the few years that they spent in these schools had a profound impact on broadening their understanding of different racial and ethnic groups. In very real ways, desegregated schools reduced racial isolation for those who took part.

In a nation still grappling with segregation, this timely book elevates the voices of Black, Latinx, and White students to craft a compelling collective narrative of the experience of desegregation. Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, author of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s

Thoughtful and well-written, Crossing Segregated Boundaries complicates a literature that people think they know well. This book will be celebrated by Chicagoans and by anyone interested in school desegregation, race and education, and the experiences of minority students during desegregation.' Hilton Kelly, author of Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow's Teachers

A unique window into the lesser-known experiences of students who participated in a desegregation programme in a northern city in the 1980s, three decades after the Brown rulings. Ethic and Racial Studies

The recollections that Danns assembles in Crossing Segregated Boundaries constitute an important contribution to histories of the desegregation era. Chicago's school integration programs were anti-systemic, built from a pessimistic view of the city's body politic. Yet in Danns's narrators, we recover memories of a buoyant optimism about intercultural connection and belonging. Danns reminds us that if we want a better view of how schools have structured social arrangements and condensed civic values, we might need to ask people what it was like when it was happening.'
History of Education Quarterly

In a nation still grappling with segregation, this timely book elevates the voices of Black, Latinx, and White students to craft a compelling collective narrative of the experience of desegregation. Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, author of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s

Thoughtful and well-written, Crossing Segregated Boundaries complicates a literature that people think they know well. This book will be celebrated by Chicagoans and by anyone interested in school desegregation, race and education, and the experiences of minority students during desegregation.' Hilton Kelly, author of Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow's Teachers

A unique window into the lesser-known experiences of students who participated in a desegregation programme in a northern city in the 1980s, three decades after the Brown rulings. Ethic and Racial Studies

The recollections that Danns assembles in Crossing Segregated Boundaries constitute an important contribution to histories of the desegregation era. Chicago's school integration programs were anti-systemic, built from a pessimistic view of the city's body politic. Yet in Danns's narrators, we recover memories of a buoyant optimism about intercultural connection and belonging. Danns reminds us that if we want a better view of how schools have structured social arrangements and condensed civic values, we might need to ask people what it was like when it was happening.'
History of Education Quarterly

DIONNE DANNS is a professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965-1985 and Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in Chicago Public Schools, 1963-1971, and the co-editor of Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History.

Contents
Introduction
1 Segregation, Politics, and School Desegregation Policy
2 Busing, Boycotts, and Elementary School Experiences
3 “The World is Bigger than Just My Local Community”: Choosing and Traveling to High Schools
4 “I Don’t Know If It Was a Racial Thing or Not”: Academic Experiences and Curriculum
5 “We Were from All Over Town”: Interracial Experiences in and out of School
6 “We All Got Along”: Difficulties and Difference
7 After High School and Desegregation Benefits
Conclusion: Continuing Inequality
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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