Race and Place
School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland

Deirdre Mayer Dougherty (Author)

9781978828001

Hardback, published 12 August 2025

166 pages, 7 B-W images
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg

"With sophistication, subtlety, and ringing moral clarity, Dougherty explains how the language of community has concealed violence and discrimination against Black Americans. Race and Place will make you rethink the measure and meaning of racial desegregation in America’s suburbs." - Campbell F. Scribner (author of The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy) "Deirdre Mayer Dougherty offers a theoretically innovative, historically sound, and interdisciplinarily rich interrogation of the history of school desegregation in one of the most lauded Black suburbs of the twentieth century. Centering the agency and activism of Black citizens and critical notions of schools and communities as sites of belonging, this account delineates how leaders and residents confronted educational policy and opportunity." - Michelle A. Purdy (author of Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools)

Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland, from 1945 through 1973. The book is organized around several successive policies that emerged in this time: school equalization, school choice, neighborhood schools, school construction, school closure, busing for racial integration, and school discipline. Dougherty shows how these policies contained and reinforced assumptions about place and created new racial truths about people and schooling.