Struggling to Learn: Legacy of an Incomplete Civil Rights Movement

June Manning Thomas, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Urban Planning, University of Michigan. She writes about post-industrial cities, planning theory, and racial justice. For lifetime achievement in the urban planning academy, she received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s (ACSP’s) highest honor, the Distinguished Educator Award, in 2023. She now serves as a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States. Dr. Thomas's most cited book by professional academics is Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (orig. 1997, 2 nd ed. 2013), which describes the need for racial justice in Detroit’s urban planning history and future; it won the 1999 Paul Davidoff Award (ACSP) for best urban planning book on social justice. She co-edited the university textbook Urban Planning and the African American Community (1996), and soon thereafter published Planning Progress: Lessons from Shoghi Effendi (orig. 1999, 2 nd ed. 2024), a study of the planning strategies of an exemplary leader of the Baha’i Faith. Other articles, co-edited books, and book chapters followed. Her most recent book is Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2021), a combination history/ memoir of the civil rights era and its implications for racial unity. In her classroom and extension work, she taught urban planning history and theory but also guided students in mentored projects that supported community development and planning in Detroit and similar cities. June Thomas's University of Michigan web page, with more detail, is here: https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/faculty/directory/june-manning-thomas/.