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This article is the second in a series of narrative studies of leaders in the field of multicultural education researched and written by Cheryl Hunter and several of her graduate students at the University of North Dakota. The first in the series appeared in the Fall 2017 issue and other articles will appear in future issues of Multicultural Education. Hunter and her students demonstrate how incorporating the personal narratives of prominent multiculturalists and practitioners with their scholarship helps us understand the depth of the scholar's writing, the complexities of such scholarship, and the passion surrounding both their work and their lived experience. The project of narrative inquiry combines qualitative research methods, including interviews, with multicultural education, thus producing a series of biographies that offer a window into the history and development of multicultural education and its concepts. The first article in the series highlighted the work and life of Marybeth Gasman and this second installment features Gloria Ladson-Billings.
Introduction
For many years, the United States has espoused to the world its economic and social progressiveness. It has boasted that its freedoms are unilaterally available for its citizens. Furthermore, the U.S. preaches the gospel of globalization and the importance of competitiveness in the marketplace (Stiglitz, 2010, p. 195), which requires it to have at its core a stable, equitable, and a regenerative educational system that is sustainable, accessible to all children, and beneficial for future economic growth. However, looking more closely at U.S. educational policy, educational equity has vacillated between policies that have deeply divided the nation.
In the mid 20th century the U.S. eradicated the southern-inspired governing clause "separate but equal," established through Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 (Sunstein, 2004, p. 102). On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided through Brown v. Board of Education that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (2004, p. 102).
It had been all too easy to navigate a wave of mass belief that segregation was beneficial to both Blacks and Whites, because "Negroes have not thoroughly assimilated" (Sunstein, 2004, p.102). Amidst this chaos, Brown "imposed a new normative polity" (Bell, 2004, p. 136) in America. This polity directed African Americans to buy into a new normative, that of working for pay with "implicit legal support" (Bell,...