Brown's Battleground by Jill Ogline Titus

Brown's Battleground by Jill Ogline Titus

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Jill Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely--and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle--under direct order of the Supreme Court--county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, Titus draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States.

Jill Ogline Titus is associate director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807835074
ISBN 10	0807835072
Title	Brown's Battleground
Author	Jill Ogline Titus
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	2011-12-30
Number of pages	296
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.