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Oh, Do I Remember!: Experiences of Teachers During the Desegregation of Austin's Schools, 1964-1971, by Anna Victoria Wilson and William E. Segall. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.

The Austin school district responded to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision with even painfully slower progress. Little history of Austin's school desegregation exists. However, as discussed in Oh, Do I Remember!, a school desegregation plan was devised called "cross-over teaching." Cross-over teaching was the involuntary assignment of Black teachers to White schools and the voluntary assignment of White teachers to Black schools. Of the 33 Black teachers and 52 White teachers who participated in Austin's cross-over teaching plan at the high school level, 18 were located and interviewed for this book. The Black cross-over teachers, three of whom gave extensive interviews, expressed greater degrees of anxiety and were less well-received in White schools than the White cross- over teachers to Black schools. It was clear that the burden of making desegregation work had been placed squarely on the shoulders of teachers and with little assistance.

The cross- over teachers discovered that Black and White students differed in their interpretation of the intent of integration. Black students perceived integration as a sharing of power. White students perceived integration as Blacks having power over them. Although Mexican American students were classified as White and were assigned to White schools, little was mentioned about their perceptions of and reactions to desegregation. Another significant benchmark in Austin's desegregation process was the 1968-1969 school year when 11 charges of noncompliance of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act were levied against the Austin School District. The district was reprieved, however by the Nixon administration's 1970 scrapping of the Lyndon Johnson administration's mandatory deadlines for full desegregation. During the ensuing years, there were two more major occurrences. In record numbers, White families fled from the city's core to the suburbs and in 1971 came the decision to close Anderson High School, the city's oldest and most revered Black high school.