Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow provides a compelling analysis of the forces and choices that have shaped the trend toward the resegregation of public schools. By assembling a wide range of contributors—historians, sociologists, economists, and education scholars—the editors provide a comprehensive view of a community’s experience with desegregation and economic development. Here we see resegregation through the lens of Charlotte, North Carolina, once a national model of successful desegregation, and home of the landmark Swann desegregation case, which gave rise to school busing.
 
This book recounts the last forty years of Charlotte’s desegregation and resegregation, putting education reform in political and economic context. Within a decade of the Swanncase, the district had developed one of the nation’s most successful desegregation plans, measured by racial balance and improved academic outcomes for both black and white students. However, beginning in the 1990s, this plan was gradually dismantled. Today, the level of resegregation in Charlotte has almost returned to what it was prior to 1971. At the core of Charlotte’s story is the relationship between social structure and human agency, with an emphasis on how yesterday’s decisions and actions define today’s choices.

Roslyn Arlin Mickelson is a Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in child development and social policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to receiving her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, she taught high school social studies in Inglewood, California, for nine years. Her research interests include minority educational issues, desegregation, gender and education, educational policy, and pathways to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Mickelson has investigated school reform in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools since 1989, chronicling its transformation from a desegregated to a resegregated school system.

Stephen Samuel Smith is a Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University and author of Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte (State University of New York Press, 2004). He received his PhD from Stanford in 1990, having returned to academia after fifteen years doing blue-collar work, most of them in Detroit-area factories. He served as an expert witness in the 1999 reopened Swann litigation and has written about education policy in numerous professional journals and edited volumes. He has published widely about urban civic capacity, urban regimes, and the politics of desegregation. In addition to his continuing interest in the politics of education, he writes about antiwar movements, resistance by U.S. soldiers to military authority during the war in Iraq, and the ideological and analytic shortcomings of the term social capital.

Amy Hawn Nelson is a community researcher and career educator who has served as a teacher, mentor, and school leader in traditional, private, and charter schools. She is a Charlotte native and graduate of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. She is currently the Director of Research for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and the Director of the Institute for Social Capital, Inc., whose mission is to advance university research and increase the community’s capacity for data-based planning and evaluation. She received her PhD in urban education and a master’s in school administration from UNC Charlotte, and a master’s in teaching from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include long-term schooling outcomes, data-informed decision making, and integrated data systems.