Books about Integration, Schools & HBCUs by various authors

The anticipation is high. Your soon-to-be-graduate has been checking every day to see if there’s good news or bad news from the college of their choice, and to determine if they need a change of plans. It’s an unnerving time, but also one of hope. So why not be prepared, and read these great books about education in the Black community… More than 70 years ago, something happened in rural Tennessee that was almost lost to history: three people – one of them, a white man – joined forces to help Black southerners get past Jim Crow laws and vote. As you’ll read in “Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement” by Elaine Weiss (One Signal, $29.99), they accomplished this feat by opening Citizenship Schools which, by 1965, had grown from one little room in the back of a grocery store, to over nine hundred such schools. How this happened, and what these schools accomplished, is a story you can’t miss. Here’s another book that presents another side of history: “Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children” by Noliwe Rooks (Pantheon, $28) challenges the narrative that says Brown v. Board of Education fixed what was wrong...