Michelle Purdy, a Black woman with dark hair and a navy blazer, speaks at a podium at the Day of Dialogue and Action

Michelle Purdy

Associate Professor of Education
Affiliated Faculty, African & African-American Studies, Urban Studies, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Equity, and History
PhD, Emory University
MA, Washington University in St. Louis
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    • Department of Education
    • MSC 1183-228-107
    • Washington University
    • 1 Brookings Drive
    • St. Louis MO 63130-4899
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    Professor Purdy's specialties include the history of U.S. education, the history of African American education, the history of school desegregation, and the history of policy, access, and opportunity.

    Dr. Michelle A. Purdy is author of the award-winning book Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Transforming the Elite combines social history, policy analysis, archival research, and oral histories to re-create an overlooked history about how Black students courageously navigated and challenged institutional and interpersonal racism as they desegregated historically white elite private schools (or independent schools) in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the experiences of the first Black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, this book showcases educational changes for Black southerners during the Civil Rights Movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the Black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

    Purdy is also co-editor of Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History and “African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power,” a special issue of The Journal of African American History. Her scholarly work, including articles and reviews, is featured in journals such as History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of African American History, and American Journal of Education and in edited volumes including The Power of Resistance: Culture, Ideology, and Social Reproduction and The Crisis of Race in Higher Education: A Day of Discovery and Dialogue.

    Purdy has written for The Washington Post on elite institutional culture and Black students and African American studies and academic freedom and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities on universities, education, and the public good. She has been featured in The New York Times about the increasing enrollment at HBCUs and in Teen Vogue on race and college admissions as well as on podcasts and in radio interviews. In addition, Purdy has spoken at colleges and universities including Yale University, Stanford University, Teachers College-Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Jackson State University, and at independent schools including The Dalton School, Episcopal High School, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, and New City School.

    Purdy earned her A.B. in educational studies and African and African-American studies and M.A. in history from Washington University in St. Louis, and Ph.D. in educational studies from Emory University.

    Awards

    2017 Outstanding Graduate Student Faculty Mentor Award 

    Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools

    Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools

    When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history.

    Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

    Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History (Research on African American Education) Paperback – August 1, 2015

    Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History (Research on African American Education) Paperback – August 1, 2015

    In 1978, V. P. Franklin and James D. Anderson co-edited New Perspectives on Black Educational History. For Franklin, Anderson, and their contributors, there were glaring gaps in the historiography of Black education that each of the essays began to fill with new information or fresh perspectives. There have been a number of important studies on the history of African American education in the more than three decades since Franklin and Anderson published their volume that has pushed the field forward. Scholars have redefined the views of Black southern schools as simply inferior, demonstrated the active role Blacks had in creating and sustaining their schools, sharpened our understanding of Black teachers' and educational leaders' role in educating Black students and themselves with professional development, provided a better understanding and recognition of the struggles in the North (particularly in urban and metropolitan areas), expanded our thinking about school desegregation and community control, and broadened our understanding of Black experiences and activism in higher education and private schools. Our volume will highlight and expand upon the changes to the field over the last three and a half decades. In the shadow of 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, contributors expand on the way African Americans viewed and experienced a variety of educational policies including segregation and desegregation, and the varied options they chose beyond desegregation. The volume covers both the North and South in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contributors explore how educators, administrators, students, and communities responded to educational policies in various settings including K-12 public and private schooling and higher education. A significant contribution of the book is showcasing the growing and concentrated work in the era immediately following the Brown decision. Finally, scholars consider the historian's engagement with recent history, contemporary issues, future directions, methodology, and teaching.