The Dream Long Deferred tells the fifty-year story of the landmark struggle for desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the present state of the city's public school system. Frye Gaillard, who covered school integration for the Charlotte Observer, updates his earlier 1988 and 1999 editions of this work to examine the difficult circumstances of the present. When the struggle to desegregate Charlotte began in the 1950s, the city was much like many other New South cities. But unlike peer communities that would resist federal rulings, Charlotte chose to begin voluntary desegregation of its schools in 1957. Over the next decade it made consistent, if slow, progress.

The glacial pace of change frustrated Charlotte's black citizens, prompting them to file lawsuits in federal court to seek nothing less than complete integration. When the U.S. District Court in 1969, and subsequently the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, upheld that demand in the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision, Charlotte became the national test case for busing. Within five years Charlotte was a model of successful integration. But that was not to last.

In 1999 a group of white citizens reopened the case to push for a return to neighborhood schools. A federal judge sided with them, finding that the plans initiated in the 1971 ruling were both unnecessary and unconstitutional because they were race-based. Charlotte's journey had come full circle.

Today, Gaillard explains, Charlotte's schools are becoming segregated once more this time along both economic and racial lines. A growing number of white students are either leaving the public school system for private institutions or converging on a few exceptional schools in affluent communities. This exodus from neighborhood schools has put the future of the city's public school system in jeopardy once more.