Will I love Their Highest Potential?

The common narrative is that rural Black schools in the segregated South were inadequate and poorly staffed; desegregation, the thinking goes, was an unmitigated good.

This book, by the esteemed historian Vanessa Siddle Walker, was one of the first I read to challenge this narrative, showing how, despite underfunding, these schools were often staffed by talented Black educators who held high standards and created nurturing, empowering classrooms.

In my research in the rural Delta, I have found that many adults today remember these schools fondly. For them, desegregation, which closed many of these schools, carried significant loss, and those losses… show more.