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When faced with the Supreme Court's order for "all deliberate speed" in achieving school desegregation, a fearful Houston school board member urged the city to "make haste slowly".

Houston, Texas, had what may have been the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States when ...

When faced with the Supreme Court's order for "all deliberate speed" in achieving school desegregation, a fearful Houston school board member urged the city to "make haste slowly".

Houston, Texas, had what may have been the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States when the Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1954. Ultimately, helped by members of its business community, Houston did desegregate its public schools and did so peacefully, without making the city a battleground of racial violence.

In Make Haste Slowly, William Henry Kellar provides the first extensive examination of Houston's racially segregated public school system, the long fight for desegregation, and the roles played by community groups in one of the most significant stories of the civil rights era.

Drawing on archival records, HISD School Board minutes, interviews with participants in the process, and the oral history collection of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Kellar shows that, while Houston desegregated its public school system peacefully, the limited integration that originally occurred served only to delay equal access to HISD schools. Houstonians shifted from a strategy of "massive resistance" to one of "massive retreat". White flight and resegregation transformed both the community and its public schools.

Kellar concludes that forty years after the Brown decision, many of the aspirations that landmark ruling inspired have proven elusive, but the impact of the ruling on Houston has changed the face of that city and the nature of its public education dramatically and in unanticipated ways.

In this well-researched and absorbing account, Paul Theobald chronicles the history of the one-room country schools that were spread throughout the rural Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the region's educational history in light of the religious, economic, and ...

In this well-researched and absorbing account, Paul Theobald chronicles the history of the one-room country schools that were spread throughout the rural Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the region's educational history in light of the religious, economic, and political atmosphere, Theobald explores the tight connection between educational preferences and religious views, between the economics of the countryside and the educational experiences of children, and between the politics of local power and the educational prospects of the powerless. Basing his study on extensive archival research, including findings from eight midwestern states - Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota - Theobald neither condemns nor lauds the one-room school experience. Providing an objective evaluation, he examines rural school records, correspondence of early school officers, contemporary texts, and diaries and letters of rural students and teachers. As he weaves together a contextualized account of the circumstances surrounding and within the one-room country schools of the Midwest, Theobald stresses that religion was of primary importance in nineteenth-century American life. Yet he also looks carefully at the shifting economic environment at work in the countryside, particularly in regard to the development of widespread farm tenancy and the consolidation of agricultural and related industries. He challenges readers to analyze how a national move from an agrarian to an industrial view caused conflict and confusion, thereby introducing irrevocable change into rural American life.