Within urban education policy research, Black people are most often presented as the objects of policy. That is, they tend to be situated on the receiving end, as beneficiaries or victims—the (Negro) problem to be solved by education policy. Very little research has documented how Black communities—particularly in the post-civil rights/post-Black Power era—make meaning of, and attempt to shape social policies. Further, we have not adequately theorized, or even documented, the historical trajectory of the Black encounter with knowledge and schooling, the dialogic between Blackness and education—what I call the Black educational imagination.

This historical ethnography documents how members of Seattle's Black community have imagined and engaged school desegregation policy from the mid-1970s, when the school district implemented a mandatory busing program (notably, without a court order), to the present, now a decade since the demise of that program, and the beginning of the resegregation of the city's schools. Using in-depth interviews and archival data, I explore the cultural production of the "educational imagination" of Black civic and religious leaders, educators and activists operating within the space of an urban Black neighborhood and its public schools. This project provides a theoretical and empirical space to explore how Black people imagine education and education policy, and how this imagination is informed by local and global political, economic and cultural transformations. In my analysis, I take into account not only the role of community forces and cultural and ideological formations but also how, over time, institutional practices and political-economic processes become implicated in the production of individual and collective education narratives and in the politics pursued to remedy educational injustice.

Research findings offer implications for the future of school desegregation and other efforts to achieve education equity, and more broadly, provide insight into how marginalized communities interpret and seek to influence school reform initiatives.