Race and Education in New Orleans

Exhaustive and immersive, Walter C. Stern’s book documents and decries the undue burdens Americans have long placed on their schools. As instruments of urban planning, social engineering, uplift, and even race-making, schools have at once been sinews of community and stumbling blocks on the road to political and economic justice. Boasting sober assessments and sound, enraging evidence, Race and Education in New Orleans is nothing less than required reading. ~N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

In crisp and clear prose, Race and Education in New Orleans shows how vigorous competition for land and resources in New Orleans required extensive racial integration until the modern era, when an intense black demand for schools and education was met in turn with an intense white resistance and pressure to create white-only spaces. This provocative and evocative history reveals how schools became forces of landscape and social development, illuminating the anxieties of white residents on the margins and institutionalizing them. ~Kent Germany, author of New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society