Revisiting the Struggle for Integration

The project we describe in this article emerged from thinking about Fridays. While the Monday through Thursday schedule at Renaissance Middle School in Montclair, New Jersey covers the traditional distribution of curriculum, Fridays are dedicated to nine-week cycles of two hour sessions. Each session involves in-depth work focusing on five themes: Aviation, Genetics, Building Bridges, Community Service and this, the Oral History Project. Because the school is thematically organized around core notions of justice, history, social movements and renaissances (that is, Italian, Harlem and Montclair), we structured this project around the deeply contested history of desegregation of the Montclair public schools