Compares European American and African American youth gangs in four historical periods (seaboard, immigrant, racially changing, and hypersegregated cities), showing that differences can be traced to race-specific effects of labor, housing, and consumer markets, government policies, local politics, and organized crime on their communities.…

Interviewed white teachers in apartheid-era South Africa who taught in segregated schools for black students, all of whom believed that they were part of the fight against apartheid. Though they taught in segregated schools, they worked to facilitate students' political awareness and voice. These teachers were penalized socially and professionally…

Presents the story of Charles Hamilton Houston, an African American legal scholar who led a crusade focused on equal educational opportunities and facilities for African American students. He used the courts to force Americans to listen to his message about racial subjugation, segregation, and lynch law. (SM)

In the years following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate America's public schools, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Robert Penn Warren, and, to a lesser extent, C. Vann Woodward, provided intellectual sustenance to southern efforts to resist racial integration. Focuses on Faulkner's political…

This statement was an appendix to the appellants' briefs in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Briggs v. Elliott, and Davis v. Prince Edward County, Virginia, cases. The statement offers definitions of segregation and discusses the implications and potential effects of segregation on children both in minority and majority groups.

Psychologists' work was cited in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). One criticism of the citation was that psychology could be used to overturn the Brown decision and return the country to segregation. A historical examination of such an attempt to overturn Brown in the early 1960s on the basis of new psychological…

Research on the effects of school desegregation, once quite common in psychology and related fields, has declined considerably since the mid-1980s. Factors contributing to changes in the quantity and focus of such research since the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision are discussed, with an emphasis on those related to the decline of this…

Reform in education in a democratic South Africa has inspired commitment to a single, inclusive education system for all. The challenges related to the changing nature of education in South Africa and the relationship of these challenges to the past, and particularly to the legacy of apartheid, have forced educational psychologists to reconsider…

The nation's best-known civil rights group has jumped into the fray over a controversial Nebraska law that would divide the 45,000-student Omaha school system into three separate districts, largely along racial and ethnic lines. In a lawsuit filed May 16 in US District Court in Omaha, Nebraska, the Omaha branch of the National Association for the…

The hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and subsequent oral history projects elevated testimony as part of the South African transformation process. In this article, the author argues that testimony as oral history is important as a public forum for people who have been historically invisible. In addition, he contends that…

The first part of the title of this lecture is taken from Ajay Heble's (2000) book "Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice." The author chose this musical image to convey the problem of good intentions gone awry. No musician plans to play the wrong note. The plaintiffs, litigators, Supreme Court Justices, and civil…

In this article the author explores possibilities for cultivating justice with reference to teaching and learning in (South African) universities. It is argued that teachers and learners ought to become responsive, democratic and critical--they need to act justly in order to break with South Africa's apartheid legacy. The author discusses why…

Background/Context: The educational fate of the children of low-wage immigrants is a salient issue in all the economically developed societies that have received major immigration flows since the 1950s. The article considers the way in which educational systems in the two countries structure the educational experiences and shape the opportunities…

Although the systems of public schools differ among Australia, South Africa and the USA, all three countries recognize that religion plays a significant role in determining values. All three countries have written constitutions but only South Africa and the USA have a Bill of Rights that protects persons' exercise of religious beliefs. In…

This article describes how Alan Newton has put his life back together after he was set free. Before he came to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, Newton spent 22 years locked up in 12 different New York state prisons for a crime he did not commit. His ordeal began when a White woman who had been raped in the Bronx mistakenly identified the…