Troubling the Waters: Fulfilling the Promise of Quality Public Schooling for Black Children

Different from numerous anecdotal accounts of urban schools and communities,
Troubling the Waters
is based on more than a decade of empirically based ethnographic and sociological research in schools and communities in St. Louis (which operated the nation’s largest voluntary desegregation plan) and Atlanta (a city that abandoned its desegregation plan in the 1970s). As a sociologist and anthropologist of education, Dr. Morris captures the experiences of African American families from a community in St. Louis who chose to send their children to either the neighborhood predominantly Black school, a racially diverse magnet school, or a predominantly White suburban school, and offers a comparative analyses with African American families’ from an Atlanta community whose children attended the neighborhood school. Grounded in the political economy of urban schooling, this book counters the views by neoconservatives that racism no longer exists, while simultaneously offering a poignant analysis of the desegregation-only paradigm towards achieving Brown’s promises.