Provides an exploration of the judicial, legislative, and neighbourhood battles over school desegregation that gripped Los Angeles in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, and that continue to plague the ""post-racial"" US. It accesses a diverse array of opinions on these years and on the current crisis of race and public education by examining landmark judicial decisions, public policy studies, and newspaper articles, and by interviewing key community leaders.

Andrew Furman is professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of the novel Alligators May Be Present and two books of literary criticism, Israel Through the Jewish American Imagination and Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma, the latter published by Syracuse University Press. His essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Poets and Writers, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Oxford American, the Miami Herald, and the Forward.