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In 1948, when Brashear was 17, President Harry Truman ordered the U.S. military to desegregate. Brashear, who was black, joined the Navy -- and was assigned to a ship's mess hall. In 1950 he applied for schooling to become a salvage diver, but was ignored until 1954, when the Navy relented and allowed him to attend. Despite racist remarks and death threats, Brashear became the Navy's first black deep sea diver, working underwater to salvage ships, planes and weaponry. In 1966, he was assigned to recover a hydrogen bomb dropped into the Mediterranean Sea when two Air Force planes collided. During the dive, which he was supervising from the surface, there was an accident on the ship; Brashear shoved another diver out of the way, but Brashear's leg was severely injured and, later, amputated below his knee. The Navy demanded he retire, but instead Brashear made a grueling comeback and returned to service, and in 1970 became the Navy's first black master diver. He retired in 1979 with the rank of master chief petty officer. In 2000, he was played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the film Men of Honor. Brashear died July 25 from respiratory and heart problems. He was 75. From This is True for 23 July 2006 Suggestions for further reading:
 List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $22.46 Editorial Review: This is the first effort to provide a broad assessment of how well the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared an end to segregated schools in the United States was implemented. Written by a distinguished group of historians, the twelve essays in this collection examine how African Americans and their supporters in twelve states--Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Delaware, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada, and Wisconsin--dealt with the Court's mandate to desegregate "with all deliberate speed." The process followed many diverse paths. Some of the common themes in these efforts were the importance of black activism, especially the crucial role played by the NAACP; entrenched white opposition to school integration, which wasn't just a southern state issue, as is shown in Delaware, Wisconsin, and Indiana; and the role of the federal government, a sometimes inconstant and sometimes reluctant source of support for implementing Brown.  By: Osha Gray Davidson List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $13.57 Editorial Review: In a vivid portrait of a relationship that defied all odds in 1960s North Carolina, Davidson tells how C.P. Ellis (a poor white member of the KKK) and Ann Atwater (a poor black civil rights activist) went from being each other's worst and most hostile enemies to forming an incredible, long-lasting friendship. By placing this very personal story into broader context, Davidson demonstrates that race is intimately tied to issues of class, and that cooperation is possible--even in the most divisive situations--when people begin to listen to one another.  By: James Fraser List Price: $58.13 Amazon Price: $58.13 Editorial Review: Students come alive when dealing with primary sources. Yet no current History of Education text supplies primary source documents. Fraser’s unique text is a documentary history of education in the United States and can save the instructor from doing a good deal of photocopying. It consists of primary source documents which illustrate and map the establishment and evolution of education in America. For example, the text includes documents such as Beecher’s “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers,” “A Nation At Risk: Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education,” and selections from Dewey’s School and Society and Holt’s How Children Fail. Introductions and explanations frame the primary sources to help students understand the background and context of the documents. The book can be used as a main or a supplemental text at either the undergraduate or graduate level.  By: Davison M. Douglas List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $24.95 Editorial Review: Using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a case study of the dynamics of racial change in the 'moderate' South, Davison Douglas analyzes the desegregation of the city's public schools from the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision through the early 1970s, when the city embarked upon the most ambitious school busing plan in the nation. In charting the path of racial change, Douglas considers the relative efficacy of the black community's use of public demonstrations and litigation to force desegregation. He also evaluates the role of the city's white business community, which was concerned with preserving Charlotte's image as a racially moderate city, in facilitating racial gains. Charlotte's white leadership, anxious to avoid economically damaging racial conflict, engaged in early but decidedly token integration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the black community's public protest and litigation efforts. The insistence in the late 1960s on widespread busing, however, posed integration demands of an entirely different magnitude. As Douglas shows, the city's white leaders initially resisted the call for busing but eventually relented because they recognized the importance of a stable school system to the city's continued prosperity.  By: R. Scott Baker List Price: $39.95 Amazon Price: $35.00 Editorial Review: In this provocative appraisal of desegregation in South Carolina, R. Scott Baker contends that half a century after the Brown decision we still know surprisingly little about the new system of public education that replaced segregated caste arrangements in the South. Much has been written about the most dramatic battles for black access to southern schools, but Baker examines the rational and durable evasions that authorities institutionalized in response to African American demands for educational opportunity. A case study of southern evasions, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 documents the new educational order that grew out of decades of conflict between African American civil rights activists and South Carolina's political leadership. Baker expands the conventional scholarly perspective, which has focused almost exclusively on the NAACP, and explores activism on a local level to desegregate schools, colleges, and universities. During the 1940s, Baker shows, a combination of black activism and NAACP litigation forced state officials to increase funding for black education. This early phase of the struggle in turn accelerated the development of institutions that cultivated a new generation of grass roots leaders. Challenging Michael J. Klarman's backlash thesis, Baker demonstrates that white resistance to integration did not commence or crystallize after Brown. Instead, beginning in the 1940s, authorities in South Carolina institutionalized an exclusionary system of standardized testing that, according to Baker, exploited African Americans' educational disadvantages, limited access to white schools, and confined black South Carolinians to separate institutions. As massive resistance to desegregation collapsed in the late 1950s, officials in other southern states followed South Carolina's lead, adopting testing policies that continue to govern the region's educational system. Paradoxes of Desegregation brings much needed historical perspective to contemporary debates about the landmark federal education law, No Child Left Behind. Baker analyzes decades of historical evidence related to high-stakes testing and concludes that desegregation, while a triumph for advantaged blacks, has paradoxically been a tragedy for most African Americans. |
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