They Came for the Schools

May 14, 2024·41 min·2 clips

A 1996 Southlake football game exposed racial tension when a Carroll student waved a sign reading T-A-N-H-O.

1. Southlake appears as the subject of "They Came for the Schools," a book preview built from reporting in Southlake and Grapevine. 2. Mike Hicksonball is the host introducing the excerpt, and Amy Roll is the mother whose 2006 road trip from Los Angeles to Texas opens Chapter One. 3. The episode asks why Southlake became a symbol of desirable schools while its housing and school policies kept changing families out. 4. Amy Roll drove her three children in a Chevy Suburban from Studio City to North Texas after researching school ratings on greatschools.org and talking about Southlake as a place with "some of the best schools in the whole nation." 5. Southlake's Town Square, dragon branding, and Carroll Independent School District impressed her with "expect excellence" banners, clean roads, and a 4,000-square-foot home she could afford. 6. The narrative jumps back to 1956, when residents near Carroll Hill School voted 30 to 24 to incorporate as Southlake after hearing about Hearst's planned annexation. 7. The episode links that vote to fears of development and to a community that had held blackface minstrel shows at Carroll Hill School. 8. The book connects Southlake's founding to wider Texas history, including Brown v. Board of Education, white flight, and nearby Mansfield High School's 1956 integration fight. 9. Southlake later adopted one-acre zoning and banned apartments and other multifamily housing units to slow growth. 10. The episode says these rules made it hard for teachers to afford homes and helped keep lower- and middle-income families out. 11. In 1985, Mayor Lloyd Lotta told the Star-Telegram that the exclusion seemed to be "the will of the people," which the episode treats as an explicit defense of the town's housing approach. 12. The excerpt then turns to Milliken v. Bradley, the 1974 Supreme Court case that refused to force suburbs into a regional Detroit desegregation plan. 13. It identifies William Rehnquist's pivotal vote and Thurgood Marshall's warning that "The very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured, but will be perpetuated." 14. The episode shows how Boston, Philadelphia, and private segregation academies followed similar patterns after courts limited desegregation remedies. 15. Carroll Independent School District's strong SAT scores are presented alongside the district's demographics, including a 1983 yearbook with virtually all-white faces and a blackface 4-H photo. 16. The excerpt names critical race theory as the legal framework that later emerged from Black scholars at Harvard to explain how race-neutral policies could preserve racial disparity. 17. The tone is explanatory and archival, with newspaper quotes, legal history, and narrated scenes from family life mixed together. 18. The format feels like a reported history essay, moving from Amy Roll's road trip to court decisions, zoning policy, and school culture. 19. Listeners interested in suburban housing, school policy, and Texas race history. 20. Listeners wanting light entertainment or a short celebrity interview.

As heard by us

An audio preview that ties Southlake's school conflict to race, zoning, and school access.

This audio preview treats the book as a report from Southlake and Grapevine on one town's fight over race and identity, and on the larger war over America's classrooms.

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Why you'd press play

You want the Southlake school fight placed inside a wider story about race, power, and belonging.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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