Now We Go to Their School: Desegregation and its Contemporary Legacy

This article explores one southern community's response to the 1954 Brown decision and its subsequent history of dealing with school desegregation. This local perspective is developed using historical data focusing on events immediately following the Brown decision, which provide a contextfor events leading up to a decision in the inid-1980s to consolidate the community's middle school students to reduce perceptions of inequality based on race. This consolidated school is the focus of the second half of the article, which analyzes the current status of desegregation in the school. Although the school has been desegregated, it is far from integrated. Many racially based inequalities exist and race continues to play an important role in structuring relationships among students, teachers, and parents.