The battle for racial equality in education came at a cost to Black Americans during the civil rights era. In 1964, fourteen-year-old June Manning Thomas walked into Orangeburg High School as one of thirteen Black students selected to integrate the all-white school, while her classmates mocked, shunned, and yelled racial epithets at her and other Black students. That period was the latest stage of a long struggle to ensure basic education for people of all races, and to provide physical, emotional, and spiritual sustenance for Black children in the legally segregated South. In Struggling to Learn, Thomas offers an intimate look at how the Black community educated its children in spite of oppression, and how fledgling alliances of Blacks and white allies built a constructive vision of a better multiracial society in spite of entrenched opposition.
"By telling her story in the larger context of Southern Racism, vitriolic resistance for anything challenging the status quo, and the structural assault on human and familial dignity and integrity, Dr. Thomas sets up the heroic story of the battle against these forces, and the deep wounds and traumas that still call out to be healed." - Hoda Mahmoudi, Bahá'í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland
Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina
Dr. Thomas captivates readers determined to learn more about what created current race relations. By overcoming her personal reticence and sharing her own experiences amidst South Carolina’s lagging, reluctant compliance with federal school desegregation requirements, she is able to humanize her important observations, which she backs with meticulous research. Her account of that facet of an important era in American history, in which she was an active participant, goes beneath the surface of “facts and figures” to include not only unsung African American heroes but the few members of the dominant white culture who personified “the other tradition” of race amity, also with much sacrifice. Additionally, she analyzes the strategies of those in power to preserve their dominance by undermining truly equal opportunity—strategies by no means limited to the South—which helped set the stage for on-going tensions and tragedies.