Left Bank Books welcomes Washington University assistant professor Michelle Purdy, who will sign and discuss her new book, “Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools,” with associate professor Lerone Martin!

This event is free and open to the public, but proof of purchase of “Transforming the Elite” from Left Bank Books will be required to enter the signing line.

When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, 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. In “Transforming the Elite,” Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history.

Lerone A. Martin is the Associate Professor of Religion and Politics in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in Saint Louis. Martin is the author of the award winning Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. The book was the 2015 recipient of the prestigious Frank S. and Elizabeth Brewer Prize for outstanding scholarship in religious history by a first time author. Martin has received a number of nationally recognized fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Council of Learned Societies, and The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, among others. His commentary and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as CNN.