Ordinary Sites

Student Resistance and the 1970s Texas School Desegregation Struggle

ArCasia D. James-Gallaway

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469697468
  9781469697451
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469695884
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

For nearly a century, legal battles over school desegregation have attracted significant 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, Ordinary Sites 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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Introduction Lessons from Black Waco
• One Spatializing Black Waco and School Desegregation
• Two Nobody Asked Us: School Closures and Student Protest as Settings of Struggle
• Three Made You Feel Less than Human: Mammies, Bucks, Problems, and Mascots in Hostile Territory
• Four I’m Black, and I Can Do This: Tenacious, Audacious Black Girl Visionaries Redefining Femininity
• Five Crafting the Care We Deserve: Uniting, Transferring, and (Dis)engaging in the Pursuit of Black Dignity
• Conclusion We Survived It: Sites of Strife That Didn’t Break Us
• Appendix Oral History Interviews
• Notes
• Index