Just Trying to Have School

When a disabled black World War II veteran signed a 1955 petition with fifty-two other Yazoo City, Mississippi, parents demanding the city abide by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and desegregate its schools, he was thereafter unable to cash his disability check at any local bank or store. As the white education superintendent Tom Dulin toured Carroll County in 1962 to explain the district's plan to desegregate, one white parent pointed a pistol at him at a public meeting and said: “If anything happens to my child, I will kill you” (p. 63). When the black Sunflower County sharecroppers Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter refused to withdraw requests to have their children enrolled in white schools in 1965, segregationists shot into their home, destroyed their gardens and farm animals, and discontinued their credit. These are but three of the incidents that Natalie G. Adams and James H. Adams relate in Just Trying to Have School. In ten chapters grounded on solid historical research and more than one hundred interviews with former students, educators, and parents who experienced school desegregation—which, for the most part, did not occur in Mississippi until after the Supreme Court forced the issue in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969)—the authors analyze a heretofore largely overlooked but important part of the second civil rights era

Civil rights · Desegregation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Supreme court · White (mutation · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms · History · Law · School Choice and Performance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies