The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina

The Dream Long Deferred tells the fifty-year story of the landmark struggle for the desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the present state of the city’s public school system. Gaillard, who covered school integration for the Charlotte Observer, updates his earlier 1988 and 1999 editions of this work to examine the difficult circumstances of the present day. Charlotte began voluntary desegregation in 1957, but the slow pace lead to lawsuits to demand immediate and complete integration. When the U.S. District Court in 1969, and subsequently the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, upheld that demand in the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Charlotte became the national test case for busing. Within five years, Charlotte was a model of successful integration. In 1999, a group of white citizens reopened the case to push for a return to neighborhood schools. A federal judge sided with them, finding that the plans initiated in the 1971 ruling were both unnecessary and unconstitutional because they were race-based. Today, Gaillard explains, Charlotte’s schools are becoming segregated once more - this time along both economic and racial lines. In this new edition of
The Dream Long Deferred , Gaillard chronicles the span of Charlotte’s five-decade struggle with race in education to remind us that the national dilemma of equal educational opportunity remains unsettled.