Compton, California, is frequently linked within the public brain with city America's hardest difficulties, together with financial disinvestment, gang violence, and failing public faculties. sooner than it grew to become synonymous with inner-city decay, even if, Compton's affordability, proximity to production jobs, and placement ten miles outdoors downtown la made it appealing to aspiring suburbanites looking single-family houses and caliber colleges. As Compton confronted demanding situations within the 20th century, and because the majority inhabitants shifted from white to African American after which to Latino, the conflict for keep an eye on over the college district grew to become symbolic of Compton's fiscal, social, and political crises.

Death of a Suburban Dream explores the heritage of Compton from its founding within the overdue 19th century to the current, taking up 3 serious issues—the historical past of race and academic fairness, the connection among faculties and position, and the advanced intersection of education and municipal economies—as they formed a la suburb experiencing fiscal and demographic transformation. Emily E. Straus rigorously lines the roots of antagonism among traditionally disenfranchised populations, blacks and Latinos, as those teams resisted municipal energy sharing inside a context of shortage. utilizing archival study and oral histories, this advanced narrative unearths how more and more racialized poverty and violence made Compton, like different inner-ring suburbs, resemble a bothered city middle. finally, the ebook argues that Compton's institution predicament isn't, at center, a hindrance of schooling; it's a long term challenge of development.

Avoiding simplistic dichotomies among city and suburban, Death of a Suburban Dream broadens our realizing of the dynamics connecting citizens and associations of the suburbs, in addition to the altering ethnic and political panorama in metropolitan America.