![]() | My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White Subjects: Basketball -- Social aspects -- California -- San Fernando Valley; Granada Hills High School (Los Angeles Calif.) -- Basketball; Furman Andrew 1968– -- Anecdotes; School integration -- California -- San Fernando Valley; Segregation in education -- Cali; Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, roughly half of Furman's high school basketball teammates lived in the largely Anglo, and increasingly Jewish, San Fernando Valley, while the other half were African Americans bused in from the inner city. Los Angeles was embroiled in efforts to desegregate its public school district, one of the largest and most segregated in the country. Tensions came to a head in the late 1970s as the state implemented its forced busing plan, a radical desegregation program that was hotly contested among Los Angeles residents--particularly among Valley residents--and at all levels of the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Andrew Furman is professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of the novel Alligators May Be Present and two books of literary criticism, Israel Through the Jewish American Imagination and Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma, the latter published by Syracuse University Press. His essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Poets and Writers, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Oxford American, the Miami Herald, and the Forward. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)