Stepping Over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools.

Stepping Over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools, by Amy Stuart Wells and Robert J. Crain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 380 pp. 35. 00, cloth. Reviewed by Garrett Albert Duncan, Washington University (Saint Louis, MO). In Stepping Over the Color Line: African-American Students in White Suburban Schools, Amy Wells and Robert Crain present the findings from their five-year study of the St. Louis, Missouri, interdistrict school desegregation plan. unique character of St. Louis, a southern city with a northern exposure, and the voluntary nature of its school desegregation plan provide an excellent laboratory to conduct a case study on the politics of race and education. first author, Wells, is associate professor of educational policy at the University of California-Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her dissertation research was instrumental to the publication of Stepping Over the Color Line. second author, Crain, is a professor of sociology of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and has written extensively on the politics of school desegregation. main objective of this work is to examine the processes and key players that contributed to the successes and the failures of the St. Louis desegregation plan. A case study research project, this book was produced using various methods including interviews with over 300 individuals, participant observations in classrooms and board meetings, and a review of numerous archives, newspapers, court documents, reports, and surveys. Though the authors seek to provide a balanced view of the state of the educational system for Black children and youth in St. Louis, they declare their allegiance to those people committed to the ideals of integration, stating at the outset that, indeed this book is written for and about them (p. 2). Stepping Over the Color Line is divided into three sections. Section 1, entitled The Politics of Race, is comprised of two chapters. Chapter 1 brings together disparate sources to demonstrate how urban and suburban jurisdictions are created through the activity of politically powerful people and thus are not the consequences of natural sorting-out processes, as might be claimed by those who refuse to acknowledge the effects of de facto segregation. Chapter 2 provides a more specific examination of activities at the grassroots level and in the courts that contributed directly to the present-day voluntary desegregation program, which includes the transfer of Black students from city schools to county and suburban schools, the transfer of White children and youth from the county and suburbs to urban magnet schools, and capital improvements for predominantly Black city schools. Section 2, The City, examines the St. Louis desegregation plan from the black side of the color line (p. 18). Chapter 3 traces the history of the St. Louis public school system, describing its transformation from a mainly White school system serving up to 110, 000 students to a predominantly Black system serving 42, 000 students. In chapter 4, the authors focus on the consumers of urban education, those Black students (and their families) who attend city schools. Chapter 5 draws upon interviews conducted with city-to-county transfer students and their families to explore the reasons Black youths from the city chose to participate in the desegregation program. This section closes with chapter 6, a portrayal of Black students who participated in the city-to-county transfer program but who then decided-or had it decided for them-to return to city schools. In some instances, these students ultimately left school altogether. concluding section 3, The Suburbs, presents the St. Louis desegregation plan from the perspective of White educators, parents, and students who live in the county and suburbs. Chapter 7 details the resistance of White educators and parents to the desegregation program. …