Poliltical Activism

Maud DeLes Lancaster is a product of public schools in Jackson, Miss. In the early 1970s, she watched as more than two-thirds of her white classmates fled to the segregation academies that sprang up when Jackson was ordered to integrate its schools. And today, as she prepares her 3-year-old daughter to enter kindergarten at her neighborhood public school, she finds herself again bucking the trend among middle-class, white families like hers.

Maud DeLes Lancaster is a product of public schools in Jackson, Miss. In the early 1970s, she watched as more than two-thirds of her white classmates fled to the segregation academies that sprang up when Jackson was ordered to integrate its schools. And today, as she prepares her 3-year-old daughter to enter kindergarten at her neighborhood public school, she finds herself again bucking the trend among middle-class, white families like hers.