In the summer of 1970, the members of the New Orleans Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals understood clearly the realities of race in the South.
Houston, Texas, like other Southern cities, had made haste toward racial
school desegregation as slowly as the White Southern Federal courts
would allow. When the High School of Performing and Visual Arts opened
its doors in Houston a year later, a new superintendent and
liberal-dominated Board of Education wished to demonstrate the positive
potential of a voluntarily desegregated student body. HSPVA was the
first United States public school for the arts specifically used for
racial desegregation purposes, the prototype for the first public urban
magnet program of desegregation used to replace a standing court order,
and a continuing prototype for other public magnet schools for the arts
across the United States. Talent Knows No Color is a 35-year history of
HSPVA, exemplary in both arts and academics, which chronicles
multi-perspective participant experiences within the context of
ever-changing district education policies and demographics. Ten years of
school system and HSPVA archival research, examination of local
newspapers, and oral history interviews allow a rich narrative unusual
among the already limited number of scholarly histories of individual
public schools. It is the description and analysis of everyday
occurrences that assist the reader in understanding what Series Editor
O. L. Davis, Jr. refers to as "the continuing, likely never ending,
practical development of one particular high school and its curriculum."
