RUTH CARBONETTE YOW RECEIVES THE NINETEENTH ANNUAL SUSANNE M. GLASSCOCK HUMANITIES BOOK PRIZE FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY SCHOLARSHIP

October 18, 2018:
The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University has awarded the Nineteenth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship to Ruth Carbonette Yow, for her book Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, published by Harvard University Press in 2017.

Dr. Yow is a historian and ethnographer of justice struggles and public education. She has a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University. Dr. Yow continues to work with the youth who populate the pages of Students of the Dream through her service as a board member and volunteer with Marietta YELLS (Youth Empowerment through Learning, Leading, and Serving). She also teaches and tutors with a prison education nonprofit, Common Good Atlanta. Her current position as Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist at Georgia Tech’s Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain allows her to engage her background in equity and community-based movements to facilitate transformative teaching, learning, and long-term projects across the campus and the city of Atlanta. Students of the Dream was a finalist for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize and shortlisted for the Victor Turner Prize.

In Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, Dr. Yow draws on over one hundred interviews with current and former Marietta High School students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and politicians, to write an innovative and compelling ethnographic history which invites readers onto the key battlegrounds of the school’s struggle against resegregation. The book begins with the first generations of Marietta High’s desegregators authorized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and follows the stories of later generations who saw the dream of integration fall apart. The failure of local, state, or national policies to stem the tide of resegregation is leading activists—students, parents, and teachers—to reject traditional integration models and look for other ways to improve educational outcomes among African American and Latino students. Dr. Yow argues for a revitalized commitment to integration, but one that challenges many of the orthodoxies—including colorblindness—inherited from the mid-twentieth century civil rights struggle.

“Yow’s evocative and enlightening work convincingly argues that there is vast potential to reimagine integration for contemporary times. Students of the Dream is a major contribution to our understanding of school integration’s impact upon society.” ―Susan Eaton, Brandeis University; author of Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best

Dr. Yow will be visiting Texas A&M in March 2019 to receive the award and participate in campus and community events in celebration of the prize. For further details, email: glasscock@tamu.edu.