Ordinary Sites : Black Student Resistance and the 1970s Texas School Desegregation Struggle

For nearly a century, legal battles over school desegregation have attracted significant scholarly attention. What desegregation meant for the day-to-day lives of Black precollegiate students, however, has remained marginal in this larger narrative. Focusing on the “ordinary” Southern town of Waco, Texas, Ordinary Sites uncovers how the lives of Waco’s Black students changed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

ArCasia D. James-Gallaway makes a compelling contribution to education history by showing how Waco’s Black students reckoned with white supremacy and exercised agency as they navigated the implementation of school desegregation in the 1970s. Drawing on extensive original oral history research to reconstruct how Blackness, gender, and class differentiated these students' experiences, adds complexity and texture to historical accounts of school desegregation. In other words, James-Gallaway uncovers what has been hiding in plain sight. She introduces new methods for exploring Black geographies and theorizes desegregation as a racialized conflict over space, showing how Waco’s Black students resisted antiBlackness in the hostile spatial environments of desegregated schools.