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I finally finished reading The Politics of Massive Resistance by Francis M. Wilhoit and I feel like I should give myself a prize.
This was a tremendously useful book to have read and an absolutely enraging book to read. It's a history of all the attempts to fight school desegration during the period from Brown v Board of Education to about the beginning of the 1970s.
This is the period that absolutely shaped the public school environment I experienced as a small child beginning in the 1980s. It shaped so many of the persistent issues of public school inequity and disinvestment that I read about in library school. And it was a history that I largely knew almost nothing about. Which is probably because of all the intentional persistent racism that the book describes.
There's just something enraging and dispiriting about reading Governors, legislators, sheriffs, et al closing public schools entirely rather than let Black kids use them. White racism is sure a thing people work really hard to hold on to.
It took me a solid 10-11 weeks to finish the book even though it's only 300 odd pages long because my blood pressure would start to rise after about 5 pages of reading.
Also, the author is writing from an immediate historical perspective which is great for getting lots of newspaper level analysis but does mean that the author's own odd historical history habits kind of irked me. (Wilhoit often seemed to feel comfortable talking about universal characteristics of entire groups of people as if they were just all one person who shared a personality... apparently this was a thing some people felt totally comfortable doing in published work back in the day, like "oh, the Scottish, they're all like that..." or "the Presbyterian character" or what have you, which is just a bit uncomfortable for me now. It was especially weird in a book with an explicitly anti-racist intent.)
This was a tremendously useful book to have read and an absolutely enraging book to read. It's a history of all the attempts to fight school desegration during the period from Brown v Board of Education to about the beginning of the 1970s.
This is the period that absolutely shaped the public school environment I experienced as a small child beginning in the 1980s. It shaped so many of the persistent issues of public school inequity and disinvestment that I read about in library school. And it was a history that I largely knew almost nothing about. Which is probably because of all the intentional persistent racism that the book describes.
There's just something enraging and dispiriting about reading Governors, legislators, sheriffs, et al closing public schools entirely rather than let Black kids use them. White racism is sure a thing people work really hard to hold on to.
It took me a solid 10-11 weeks to finish the book even though it's only 300 odd pages long because my blood pressure would start to rise after about 5 pages of reading.
Also, the author is writing from an immediate historical perspective which is great for getting lots of newspaper level analysis but does mean that the author's own odd historical history habits kind of irked me. (Wilhoit often seemed to feel comfortable talking about universal characteristics of entire groups of people as if they were just all one person who shared a personality... apparently this was a thing some people felt totally comfortable doing in published work back in the day, like "oh, the Scottish, they're all like that..." or "the Presbyterian character" or what have you, which is just a bit uncomfortable for me now. It was especially weird in a book with an explicitly anti-racist intent.)
