Paradoxes Of Desegregation: African American Struggles For Educational Equity In Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 [Hardcover]

In this provocative appraisal of desegregation in South Carolina, R. Scott Baker contends that half a century after the Brown decision we still know surprisingly little about the new system of public education that replaced segregated caste arrangements in the South. Much has been written about the most dramatic battles for black access to southern schools, but Baker examines the rational and durable evasions that authorities institutionalized in response to African American demands for educational opportunity.

A case study of southern evasions, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 19261972 documents the new educational order that grew out of decades of conflict between African American civil rights activists and South Carolinas political leadership. Baker expands the conventional scholarly perspective, which has focused almost exclusively on the NAACP, and explores activism on a local level to desegregate schools, colleges, and universities. During the 1940s, Baker shows, a combination of black activism and NAACP litigation forced state officials to increase funding for black education. This early phase of the struggle in turn accelerated the development of institutions that cultivated a new generation of grass roots leaders.

Challenging Michael J. Klarmans backlash thesis, Baker demonstrates that white resistance to integration did not commence or crystallize after Brown. Instead, beginning in the 1940s, authorities in South Carolina institutionalized an exclusionary system of standardized testing that, according to Baker, exploited African Americans educational disadvantages, limited access to white schools, and confined black South Carolinians to separate institutions. As massive resistance to desegregation collapsed in the late 1950s, officials in other southern states followed South Carolinas lead, adopting testing policies that continue to govern the regions educational systel“¦