Historian Dionne Danns's books have established the authoritative policy chronology of Chicago's halting and half-hearted process of school desegregation stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s. In her latest contribution, Danns breaks new ground by centering the experiences of students, and by emphasizing the unique features of the city's integration initiatives—namely its heavy reliance on school choice and its tripartite (Black-White-Latino) racial order.
Danns's methodology, inspired by sociologist Amy Stuart Wells's Both Sides Now, is a case study in navigating the practical challenges of oral history. Using the Chicago public high school class of 1988 as her universe, Danns narrowed to those ten schools that could be described as “integrated,” narrowed again to the five that were holding class reunions in 2008, and then succeeded in becoming an authorized party crasher at two of them. Ultimately, she and her research assistants collected oral history interviews with sixty-eight narrators—roughly split between a North Side high school (Von Steuben) and a South Side high school (Bogan). In an effort to broaden the picture with a look at the city's most elite integrated high school, she supplemented this sample with four interviews with graduates from a Near West Side magnet school (Whitney Young). Danns's interviews serve as the bases for thematically organized chapters that explore pre-high school neighborhood memories, the role of school choice and transportation, academics, intercultural social life, interracial conflicts, and post-high school legacies.
Early on, Danns distinguishes desegregation (the technical creation of “mixed” populations in a given schoolhouse) from integration (the civic project of interracial and intercultural comfort). Integration, she argues, was a participatory affair in which students themselves built the norms and values of a tolerant community. But, as Danns demonstrates persuasively, these civic and cultural accomplishments depended, in a paradoxical way, on the persistence of a larger landscape of persistent residential segregation and on the naturalization of disadvantage as inherent in Black neighborhoods. Without what appeared to Chicagoans as a permanently disadvantaged social milieu, the integrative act of what Danns describes as “boundary crossing” (p. 5) would be civically meaningless. As she emphasizes, the “very act of choosing schools exposed the inequality among them” (p. 4).
The strengths of Danns's study come in the textured treatment of individual neighborhoods and schools. Her profile of the Southwest Side in the early 1980s is particularly rich, providing material not found in other desegregation studies: recollections from White students who when they were children marched with their parents against the integration of Black pupils; the unique experiences of Mexican American students as their parents declined invitations to do the same; other Mexican American students who were chased out of a mostly-Black magnet school by hostile peers. Elsewhere, Danns's subjects testify to the unambiguous perceptions of academic failure and physical danger that many higher-achieving youngsters and their parents had of their neighborhood high schools, especially on the city's West Side. Stories of gang violence in and around neighborhood high schools supplied a strong motivation to pursue other options. Danns reconstructs the tangle of personnel involved in magnifying these perceptions and performing the “choice work” (p. 71) that paved the escape routes taken by her narrators: parents on a schedule of open house visits; magnet high school recruiters; the encouragement by elementary school counselors; older siblings with the inside scoop on application processes; and the vaguely implied role of political connections. Danns's sustained exploration of interracial social interactions affords a nuanced teen's-eye view of the fluidity of race and ethnicity in daily experience. While Chicago's landscape remained a fixed piece of racial knowledge (Black neighborhoods, White neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods, etc.), the school setting was, for many of Danns's narrators, a place where this map-and-pie chart of ascribed racial identities was unsettled in favor of a more fine-grained understanding of Chicago's multiplicity of ethnic and social subcultures. As Danns narrators’ recollections imply, the integrated school provided a safe venue for exiting comfort zones (in contrast to city streets or public transit), but it was up to the students to improvise the friendships, enmities, and dating relationships that constituted the real content of a multicultural education. Pressed by Danns's researchers to recall episodes of racial conflict, narrators were inclined to demote ethnic bullying and teasing to a sort of background din (laughter punctuates many of these recollections). But their memories of signal “moments”—most notably the November 1987 death of Chicago mayor Harold Washington and the diverse reactions it provoked (of mourning, indifference, or even celebration)—were sharp reminders to students of the racial divide that defined politics in the city.
Danns's interview subjects were unanimous in reporting that their time at integrated high schools was beneficial. Their experience was one that broadened horizons, “shattered stereotypes” (p. 177), and built “a greater understanding and appreciation of other cultures” (p. 176). As one subject put it, integration was nothing short of “life changing” (p. 177). Conceding the nostalgic glow of the high-school reunion setting in which they were collected, the testimonies that Danns assembles constitute important evidence about the system of civic values built by and for young people in the American post-civil rights era, and about the durable hold that they have on college-educated adults in the twenty-first century. For those in Danns's sample, at least, the tenets of late twentieth-century multiculturalism—an appreciation of difference and a withholding of prejudice—appear to have been lived formatively, remembered fondly, and held earnestly. Ultimately, Danns affirms her narrators’ conclusions about the legacy of Chicago's school integration era, that “the good outweighed the bad” (p. 184), while also emphasizing that because those benefits were almost of an entirely personal nature, they should be viewed as “short lived and unsustainable” (p. 180).
Danns's study provokes us to think historically and sociologically about the link between civic commitments to diversity and the mechanics of a choice-enabled, college-preparatory education. As Danns points out, her interview subjects—95 percent of whom had attended some college, and 60 percent of whom had earned a bachelor's degree—are substantially more educated than their national age cohort, and especially so in comparison to the rest of their Chicago public school classmates, whose dropout rate hovered around 40 percent during the late 1980s. Danns rightly highlights how a sense of being special shaped both the regime of opportunity that her narrators faced at the end of eighth grade, and the warm memories they had as adults looking back on their high-school years. While Danns does solicit a number of interesting commentaries about social class from her narrators, Crossing Boundaries denies us a full view of the economic, occupational, and educational backgrounds of its narrators’ families, making it difficult to render a social portrait of this exceptional cohort, or to read their recollections against the grain of multiculturalism's own slogans.
A substantive shortcoming of the book comes in its theoretical framework. In each chapter, Danns solicits multiple theoretical assists from sociology, anthropology, and education studies. Unfortunately, these guest appearances are so fleeting (and less compelling than Danns's own source material) that they read as editorial commentary rather than theoretical intervention. Left unconnected to each other, these conceptual threads struggle to find application to the local demographic and political conditions of 1980s Chicago. Chapter 4 suffers the most from this dynamic, as Danns stretches, with limited support from her narrators, to sustain a claim that the curricula at Bogan, Von Steuben, and Whitney Young “served to normalize whiteness” (p. 14). Even Danns's titular invocation of “boundaries,” borrowed from ethnic formation theory, struggles on a similar count. Danns's claim, that Black students “crossed boundaries” while Latinos “blurred” them, does not clarify what these social and symbolic boundaries were made of, and becomes difficult to track after its introduction in the opening pages (p. 6).
These conceptual limitations notwithstanding, the recollections that Danns assembles in Crossing Segregated Boundaries constitute an important contribution to histories of the desegregation era. Chicago's school integration programs were anti-systemic, built from a pessimistic view of the city's body politic. Yet in Danns's narrators, we recover memories of a buoyant optimism about intercultural connection and belonging. Danns reminds us that if we want a better view of how schools have structured social arrangements and condensed civic values, we might need to ask people what it was like when it was happening.
