A01=Thomas E. Truitt
African Americans
Anna Rose
Assistant superintendent
Author_Thomas E. Truitt
Black school
Board of directors
Brown v. Board of Education
Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes)
Category=JBSL
Category=JN
Desegregation
Education
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Executive session
Magnet school
Middle school
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Of Education
Plaintiff
School district
Substitute teacher
Supervisor
Tax
Product details
- ISBN 9781570036385
- Weight: 442g
- Dimensions: 160 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2006
- Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1987, when veteran school administrator Thomas E. Truitt took the post of district superintendent in Florence, South Carolina, he assumed leadership of a public school system in denial of its racial disharmony. More than three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, Florence District One had never accomplished an integration plan that met federal approval; rather the district had skirted the intent of the federal mandate by employing ""freedom of choice"" and traditional attendance zones. In the 1990s, a single issue - the need to replace an aging, predominantly black elementary school - brought to the fore the local population's anguished attitudes about race and education. ""Brick Walls and Other Barriers"" recounts in wrenching detail how legacies of discrimination and injustice combined to divide a community along racial lines. Truitt takes readers into the complex inner workings of a modern school system, detailing the relationships between school boards and professional administrators to which few parents or citizens are privy. He describes a two-year struggle that included heated public meetings, an NAACP lawsuit, a federal court hearing, and a court-mandated change in the election of school board members. Shedding light on the intractability of racial problems in South Carolina, Truitt stresses that the story of what happened in Florence cannot be understood in isolation but must be viewed as a tale that exposes much about the current state of public education in the South and across the United States.
Thomas E. Truitt's career in education has spanned forty-three years and three states. As a teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent, he helped to integrate schools in Burlington, North Carolina, and Danville, Virginia. In South Carolina he served as Florence District One superintendent for eleven years and as executive director of the Pee Dee Education Center, a consortium of nineteen school districts in South Carolina. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
