A new book out this month brings together hard data, and the author’s own family history, to trace the impacts of school desegregation over four generations. Michigan Public education reporter Sarah Cwiek sat down with Noliwe Rooks —the author of “Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Students” — with a focus on how Detroit plays into that larger story.
SC: Noliwe Rooks is also a professor and the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Noliwe, thank you so much for joining me.
Okay, so the passage I would like you to read is actually from the very first page of the introduction. And the paragraph is the very second paragraph that begins with, “I heard that part just fine.” And before you read it, could you sort of set us up? Could you tell us a little bit of background about this anecdote before you read the passage?
NR: So I start the book with a story that I heard from an attorney friend who was filing a lawsuit on behalf of New York City school children about the treatment and their experience of their treatment in New York City public schools. And so in talking to me, she told me this story about a school trip that a group of students in a Bronx elementary school were going to take to a private school. So the Bronx is one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S. and has children, a majority of whom are Puerto Rican, Black, Latinx, Dominican. So they were going off to visit for a day. And she's telling me this story, and here we go.
“I heard that part just fine. It took me a minute to fully grasp the rest. One day, the little girl came home and with squealed excitement shared the news that her class was going on a field trip to a rich school. They would, she said, ride yellow buses, meet other children, and see different teachers. She assured her mother she would be on her best behavior. A few days after the trip, a teacher found the little girl at her desk, scraping away at her arm with a paper clip. She was trying to erase the chocolate-hued top layer of her skin and free the white skin hiding underneath. She had decided that skin, her skin, was the reason she didn't go to a pretty school like the one she and her classmates had visited on that field trip, and it made her feel sad.”
SC: Okay, that's obviously a really disturbing but very powerful story. Why did you decide to start the book with it?
NR: The visual for me of a little girl thinking that if she just removed the top layer of her skin, that there was white skin hiding underneath, and that a child had grasped in the way that a kid might make sense of what they were seeing, that it was a question of skin. And I think I wanted to both declare the intentions of the book, but also hopefully start with people who read it thinking of the children who are involved in the stories and in this moment, and then the ways that we are responding and not responding to inequality in public schools.
SC: Well, I just want to say I think the way that you do weave in a lot of storytelling and your own personal family history into the book, which we'll get to in a little bit, is very compelling. But if you could sort of give me, I guess, what we'd call the reader's digest version of what this book is about. But also, why did you think this was an important book to write at this particular moment?
NR: So what the book really is about is primarily the response to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board was a court case decided in 1954 that basically made racial discrimination in education illegal, to group students in certain schools based on race and not allow them to move based on race to other schools was illegal. And it's a real kind of high point of American civil rights law, of just American democracy, that taxpayer dollars should not go to subsidize unequal treatment in any kind of way.
Over time, though, despite that initial kind of enthusiasm, almost euphoria, about this landmark ruling, there was a resistance to it, to implementing it. People liked the idea. But the reality of what that means, to equalize access to education, means you may have to have your children attend a school outside of the neighborhood, if you're white, and you don't want that. Or if you are Black, your children may have to get on a bus and attend the school and go somewhere else. So it started the language around Brown became one of equal rights for white people and white children, and self-determination for white people.
My grandparents were teachers and they taught in one of these segregated schools, and I have their yearbooks. And what you're looking at is a really robust educational experience for those children. You're looking at chess clubs, driving clubs, astronomy club filled with Black kids, filled with Black teachers, clean facilities, training programs. And so what I was trying to grapple with, really, was how... how rare it was for me to see my grandparents, the schools they taught at, coherent and positive representations of Black schools in our discussions of Brown v. Board. A lot of schools were not like that. It's just that enough were. Why tell the story now is to really make clear that you have to have a clear understanding of what the story is if you're going to propose workable solutions. And ultimately, that's what I want.
SC: I'm sitting here in Michigan, as you know, and actually Michigan, and specifically Detroit, play a pretty significant role in this book in parts. And I think there's two big components of that. Could you explain what that was, and why it was significant in terms of integration or lack of integration in schools?
NR: The strategy people had outside of the South for making sure that you could abide by these laws about integrating schools didn't actually apply outside of the South. And so the move up North became, how do you start to integrate schools when there's nothing on the books saying that they can't be?
Bussing comes up as white people are moving out farther and farther beyond the traditional municipal lines. They're taking their tax dollars with them, but also you can't integrate with people who aren't there. The whole thing is we want white-Black integration. And you know 40, 50, 60% of Detroit public schools go from basically pretty equal to majority-Black over a 10-year period because white families are picking up and moving because they don't want to integrate, among other things.
And so all over the nation then, what you see is even a speeding up of the leaving behind majority-Black districts, and setting up new districts and taking tax dollars and saying, well, now we're not even part of the greater metropolitan area. We're our own separate district, and we will fund it ourselves.
SC: The state takeover at various times between 1999 and about 2016 of the Detroit Public Schools also takes up a pretty decent chunk of your book. So can you explain why you focused in on that?
NR: Detroit Public Schools during that period were really very much a part of the so-called education reform movement, which really was seeking to privatize forms of education, to streamline, to make cheaper. But in the practice of doing it, it removed a lot of democratic checks and balances. And so that model of emergency manager who has almost unlimited control over the financial health of these various areas that they're in charge of.
And this is right at the point though when there's this tightening of bureaucratic control and moving away from citizens being able to make these determinations. These two things collide. And it undoes the idea of privatization. The emergency manager makes a series of decisions that really end up undermining all of this hope that had been generated at a grassroots level in the ability to fix what was broken in these schools. And they basically just undid one after another, every intervention. Which left schools still segregated, still performing haphazardly, if not just poorly.
SC: Your family history is a big part of this book. I guess, just from sort of a writerly point of view, I'm curious: did you start out with the intention of doing that, or is it something that as you sort of started writing and thinking about this, that it came to you that your family story was an important part of the larger story?
NR: Initially, I think I started out thinking I wanted to write a sort of family memoir. So my family is in this book more to humanize, and as examples of what happened to us, so there's something concrete to hold onto.
So what quickly became clear is you can use your family to humanize, but you have to also tell the story.
And I hope that policymakers, just parents, if they take something away, is that even in the worst of times, even in the most harrowing times, from depressions to wars to Jim Crow periods, we have always known how to educate this subset of kids and it's a project worth continuing. And it makes no sense to have a young girl sitting in a classroom trying to scrape her skin off because she thinks on her own that that's the only way that she can have the kind of education that she's seen. And I hope, if nothing else, that readers, if they choose to read the book, will understand that that can't stand. Like, whatever else is true, that can't stand.
Noliwe Rooks is the author of “Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children.” She spoke with Michigan Public education reporter Sarah Cwiek.
