Ansley T. Erickson, Assistant Professor of History & Education, will receive the 2016 History of Education (HES) Society Prize for the best article in the field published during the past two years. 

Erickson and her co-author, Andrew Highsmith, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Irvine, will be honored for their article "Segregation as Splitting, Segregation as Joining: Schools, Housing, and the Many Modes of Jim Crow," which appeared in the American Journal of Education in August 2016.

The award will be formally presented at the HES annual meeting this coming November. 

In their article, Erickson and Highsmith explore the workings of school and neighborhood segregation in the city of Flint, Michigan during the 20^th century. Taking a highly nuanced approach, the two researchers argue that while Flint’s leaders certainly sought to divide their city along racial lines, they also drew on “various strands of progressive reform and educational thought” in their belief that “community bonds would be stronger in segregated neighborhoods anchored by their schools.”

Flint’s “community schools” became a model for “hundreds of cities nationwide,” Erickson and Highsmith write, “exemplifying the paired embrace of segregation as joining and splitting.”   

The HES award committee has praised Erickson and Highsmith for bringing “an entirely new outlook to the conversation about school desegregation, one that will change the direction of future research in the field.” 

Erickson is the author Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits, recently published by University of Chicago Press.

Published Wednesday, Aug 17, 2016