Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools

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Discount Code: NYUP30

Many consider the 1962 and 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decisions declaring school prayer and Bible-reading unconstitutional the end of religion in public schools, and 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education the dawn of school racial equality. These two major American educational movements of the twentieth century, secularization and desegregation, are often seen as separate. In Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools, I reveal how, contrary to conventional wisdom, religion undergirded government policies on race and everyday school structures before and after the prayer and Bible-reading cases. Using New York City as a window into a national story, I show that intersections of religion and race informed the major conversations about twentieth-century American public education, from school desegregation, youth crime, and multicultural education to government aid to religious schools, community control of education, and prayer and Bible-reading.