This article reconstructs the story behind Freeman v. Pitts (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history in Freeman.

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked “local control” to justify building their own high school and battled against both New Brunswick and the New Jersey Department of Education, which ostensibly supported integration and the creation of larger, consolidated school districts. Black and Latino city residents initially advocated integration but soon renounced integration and demanded “community control” over New Brunswick High. Ultimately, the New Jersey Department of Education permitted the schools in the city and the suburb to become separate, allowing segregation to prevail in the so-called “era of integration.”

Fannie Fern Andrews, a Boston educator and reformer, started the American School Peace League (ASPL) in 1908 in order to educate schoolchildren in the principles of what she called “world citizenship.” Through its curriculum, A Course in Citizenship, the ASPL taught students about cooperation, tolerance, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. At the same time, however, they were preparing white, native-born US children to lead the new world and to judge others’ capacity for membership in it—their fitness for world citizenship—according to “civilized,” white American standards. I argue that while Andrews and the ASPL professed a desire for internationalism, theirs was very much a US-dominated internationalism. A Course in Citizenship calibrated the standards of progress and civilization by which children were to measure not only themselves but others around the world. Education for peace was also education for the new American empire.

The following article documents the expansion of high school exchange programs during the Cold War. It also examines the potential conflicts underlying that expansion, which relied on preexisting networks of government agencies and private philanthropies and sometimes conflated the rhetoric of world peace with a narrower pursuit of American interests. Ultimately, the article contends, experiences abroad prompted teenagers to criticize American foreign policy and to reform their sponsoring organizations along increasingly multilateral, anti-colonial, and socially conscious lines.

The Coleman Report

For this History of Education Quarterly Policy Forum, we look at the historical significance of the 1966 Coleman Report from several different perspectives. The four main essays published here originated as presentations for a session on “Legacies of the Coleman Report in US Thought and Culture” at the History of Education Society annual meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in November 2016. Presenters for that session— Zoë Burkholder, Victoria Cain, Leah Gordon, and Ethan Hutt—went on to participate in an HES-sponsored session entitled “Currents in Egalitarian Thought in the 1960s and 1970s: The Coleman Report in American Politics, Media, and Social Science” at the Organization of American Historians meeting in New Orleans in April 2017. Thinking that their reflections on the reception and influence of the Coleman Report in different contexts would be of broad interest to HEQ readers, we asked members of the panel to comment on each other's papers and revise them for this Forum. We then invited Harvey Kantor of the University of Utah and Robert Lowe of Marquette University to write an introduction summarizing the origins and findings of the Coleman Report, along with their own assessment of what the presenters’ essays teach us about its long-term significance. What follows are Kantor and Lowe's Introduction, “What Difference Did the Coleman Report Make?,” together with substantive essays by Zoë Burkholder of Montclair State University, Victoria Cain of Northeastern University, Leah Gordon of Amherst College, and Ethan Hutt of the University of Maryland.