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Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.

A unique insight into desegregation in the suburbs and how racial inequality persists

Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road, Gregory Smithsimon shows us how this happened, and why it matters, unearthing the hidden role that suburbs played in establishing the Black middle-class.

Focusing on Liberty Road, a Black middle-class suburb of Baltimore, Smithsimon tells the remarkable story of how residents broke the color barrier, against all odds, in the face of racial discrimination, tensions with suburban whites and urban Blacks, and economic crises like the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Drawing on interviews, census data, and archival research he shows us the unique strategies that suburban Black residents in Liberty Road employed, creating a blueprint for other Black middle-class suburbs.

Smithsimon re-orients our perspective on race relations in American life to consider the lived experiences and lessons of those who broke the color barrier in unexpected places. Liberty Road shows us that if we want to understand Black America in the twenty-first century, we must look not just to our cities, but to our suburbs as well.

Co-authored by Luke Elliott-Negri (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Isaac Jabola-Carolus (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology), Marc Kagan (Ph.D. candidate, History), Jessica Mahlbacher (Ph.D. '21, Political Science), Manès Weisskircher , and Anna Zhelnina (Ph.D. '20, Sociology)

Presents cutting edge theory about the consequences of social movements and protest while asking what kind of trade-offs protest movements face in trying to change the world around them.

Many scholars have tried to figure out why some social movements have an impact and others do not. By looking inside movements at their component parts and recurrent strategic interactions, the authors of Gains and Losses show that movements usually produce a variety of effects, including recurring packages of gains and losses. They ask what kinds of trade-offs and dilemmas these packages reflect by looking at six empirical cases from around the world: Seattle's conflict over the $15 an hour minimum wage; the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City; a democratic insurgency inside New York City's Transport Workers' Union; a communist party's struggle to gain votes and also protect citizen housing in Graz, Austria; the internal movement tensions that led to Hong Kong's umbrella occupation; and Russia's electoral reform movement embodied in Alexei Navalny. They not only examine the diverse players in these cases involved in politics and protest, but also the many strategic arenas in which they maneuver. While each of these movements made some remarkable gains, this book shows how many also suffered losses, especially in the longer run.