Stepping over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools. This item is unavailable.Stepping over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools

This richly illustrated book is the first comprehensive exploration of precisely what imported prints were used as sources of inspiration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Wells-Cole sets out a visual feast of buildings and their contents, side by side with photographs of the prints that inspired them.

The Brown decision arrived at the public schools of the St. Louis area nearly 40 years after it was announced. Desegregation begun in 1983 differs from the forced busing frays that roiled such cities as Boston in the 1970s in that it was mostly voluntary: about 13,000 black students choose from 20 predominantly white and wealthy suburban school districts in which to enroll. The attitudes engendered by the program compose the core of this intent study. It has general resonance because the authors situate the particularities of St. Louis in the framework of the depopulation of American cities after 1950 and the reinforced color line dividing cities and suburbs that resulted. Wells, who grew up in St. Louis, and Crain interviewed hundreds involved in the desegregation program and obtained frank opinions from both the "transfers," as the code word goes, and the white educators in suburbia. A calm, scholarly description with a high quotient of objectivity that should engage those active, as professionals or protesters, in desegregation cases. Gilbert Taylor