We Can Do It is to my knowledge the only book that examines the challenges and impacts of school desegregation across an entire community. My inspirations were Richard Kluger's Simple Justice (about Brown), J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (about Boston), Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (I write about African Americans who chose to remain in the South), and Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential (role of South's black schools). I graduated from Gainesville High School (Florida) in 1962, two years before the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed to desegregate the county's schools. There would not be white opposition, but the black community divided, with about one-third of students attending white schools and two-thirds with many community members supporting the black schools. Not until 1968 did the Supreme Court, at the Defense Fund's motion, declare the South's historically black schools had to be combined with the white schools into unitary systems. Only then did the educational challenges of desegregation emerge in Alachua County, with changes to curriculum, extracurricular activities, student government, and so on. Alachua County's African American community remains divided over the benefits of desegregation. The book relies on extensive interviews by me and from the University of Florida's Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, together with primary source research. I received my A.B. magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia College in 1966, and was Editorials Editor of Spectator. My law degree is from Harvard Law School in 1969. Publisher is New York: RosettaBooks, 2018.
https://wecandoitbook.com