Selected Publications on De- and Re-segregation

Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City (Harvard UP, 2017) developed from my research on historical desegregation, contemporary resegregation, and the future of integrated schooling in Marietta, Georgia.  The dissertation manuscript was the sole runner up for the 2014 Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize. 

"Shadowed Places and Stadium Lights: An Oral History of Integration and Black Student Protest in Marietta, Georgia," Oral History Review (Winter/Spring 2015) 42 (1) 70-95.    This oral history of school desegregation in Marietta, Georgia, focuses on football culture as a stage for racial reconciliation and rupture. The state championship that Marietta High’s first integrated team won in 1967 functions as the foundational event in Marietta's narrative of racial harmony. This discussion explores how that racial harmony narrative obscured black student activism, particularly the homecoming protests of 1969. The oral history and analysis here make a case both for the importance of excavating suppressed histories of activism, as well as for identifying the processes that obscured those events. Such narratives of student protest are, I argue, critical to how contemporary school communities can formulate a politics of racial justice in place of a narrative of racial harmony.    

"It's Being Black and Poor: Race, Class and Desegregation at Pebblebrook High," Southern Spaces, February 20, 2012.    This piece draws primarily on an oral history with Virginia Ward, the first black student at metro Atlanta's Pebblebrook High School.  Through Ward's narrative, I explored class dynamics in Southern desegregation processes, especially in those instances in which a working class black student, like Ward, entered all white environments as the sole desegregator and navigated that lonely, unfamiliar terrain alone.