My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, roughly half of Furman’s high school basketball teammates lived in the largely Anglo, and increasingly Jewish, San Fernando Valley, while the other half were African Americans bused in from the inner city. Los Angeles was embroiled in efforts to desegregate its public school district, one of the largest and most segregated in the country. Tensions came to a head in the late 1970s as the state implemented its forced busing plan, a radical desegregation program that was hotly contested among Los Angeles residents—particularly among Valley residents—and at all levels of the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

In My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White, the high school’s diverse basketball team serves as the entry point for a trenchant exploration of the judicial, legislative, and neighborhood battles over school desegrega­tion that gripped the city in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and that continue to plague our “post-racial” nation. Furman accesses a diverse array of opinions about these years and about the current crisis of race and public education by examining landmark judicial decisions, public policy studies, and newspaper articles, and by interviewing key community lead­ers, including former U.S. Representative Bobbi Fiedler, the Jewish activist who led the campaign to stop forced busing in Los Angelese, and retired Superior Court Judge Paul Egly, with whom Fiedler and her allies wrangled. Furman also documents his recent visit to Los Angeles during which he met with sev­eral of his former teammates, coaches, and neighbors. At once critical and fair-minded, My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White cuts through the incendiary rhetoric over school desegregation to offer a lucid, engaging, and informed account of our long legacy and current challenges regarding race and public education.