Book Reviews: Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764–1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. 368 pp

In his book Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764–1960, Walter C. Stern, assistant professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uncovers the role public schools played in creating and maintaining racial stratification throughout New Orleans from the colonial era to the 1960s, and demonstrates that they did so long before “white flight’’ as we currently understand it “took root” (p. 7). In doing so, Race and Education in New Orleans “challenges the dominant periodization and characterization of metropolitan transformation” (p. 9) as it interrogates white rationales and tactics to exclude black students from the city's public schools as well as various black communities' responses to those threats of repudiation. [...]during the colonial era, white businesspeople who started public schools ultimately thought they could utilize a strong public school system to change the city's transient reputation by promoting urban growth, economic development, and fixed black-white relations; blacks, however, believed they could utilize public schools to expand a social vision that would disrupt fixed and stratified ideas on race (p. 15). Since wealthy white New Orleanians rarely sent their children to public schools, the school system left middle- and working-class whites duking it out with blacks as the two groups found themselves pitted against each other.