Wanda Rushing's "School Segregation and Its Discontents: Chaos and Community in Post-Civil Rights Memphis"

            Wanda Rushing wrote an article entitled “School Segregation and Its Discontents: Chaos and Community in Post-Civil Rights Memphis”.  It focuses on the merger of Memphis and Shelby County schools that occurred between 2010 and 2013, and argues that this “reveals a great deal about processes that sustain patterns of inequality”(Rushing, 2017, p.13). This analysis was based on a qualitative case study that interviewed a population of community leaders who had experienced the “civil rights era” and those born after, and also reviewed census and newspaper documents and statements given in public forums. Our class has begun to consider the reality and implications of legally sanctioned segregation in the early civil rights movement, and this article exemplifies the continuing impact of this history. This article provides an in-depth look at the circumstances and responses of this merger and how it relates to the realities of school segregation in the 21^st century.

Since Brown v. Board of Education, the body of literature that analyzed segregation in schools has focused primarily on segregation among schools in the same district. Much of this research, and the desegregation policies that stemmed from it, has ignored the overwhelming demographic differences between school districts in the same metropolitan area. Rushing believes that between school district segregation is the largest contributing factor to the persistence of education inequality based on race. Between 1970 and 2000 within-school district segregation declined, while between-school district segregation increased. Rushing also notes a trend toward the creation of multiple smaller municipal districts and how this “increases metropolitan fragmentation, exacerbating segregation and inequality between districts, particularly between urban and suburban ones” (Rushing, 2017, p. 6). This trend was evident in the years following the Memphis and Shelby County school merger when many Memphis suburbs, including Germantown, Collierville, and Arlington, established their own school districts with noticeably all-white school boards.

            Rushing’s theoretical background defines segregation as a system that encourages unequal categorical distinctions, such as city-county or black-white. Rushing’s analysis concludes that “efforts to maintain social, political, and educational boundaries between these unequal categories relied on old symbols, images, and ideologies of individualism, competition, and local autonomy to reinforce the status quo” (Rushing, 2017, p. 26). In multiple interviews, the interviewee’s perspective of the success or failure of previous desegregation efforts, such as busing, was utilized as a tool to support their position on the current issue. The excerpts Rushing provides of the interviews taken for this project show the extent to which history shapes our understanding of the present.

Rushing, W. (2017). School Segregation and its Discontents: Chaos and Community in Post-Civil Rights Memphis. Urban Education, 52(1), 3-31.