A professor has combined personal experience and historical research to write a nationally released book.

Patricia Leigh, associate professor of curriculum and instruction, has written “Fly in the Ointment,” a book examining the segregation and desegregation of school districts in the communities surrounding Cincinnati in the 1970s.

The book specifically examines the predominantly white Princeton school district and the mostly black Lincoln Heights district, where Leigh grew up.

Leigh became interested in learning what spurred the desegregation of the racially divided communities while she was a graduate at Iowa State in the mid ’90s. She researched how segregation developed in the neighboring communities during the early 1900s until they were desegregated in 1970.

“I didn’t feel that discrimination could be suddenly eliminated in the hearts of those living in these areas,” Leigh said.

She discovered that the merging of the two school districts was not a result of changed attitudes, but rather because of the threat of lawsuits.

Although years had passed since the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling overturning segregation in public education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many people were unaware of the segregation that still occurred in northern states and only focused on segregation in the South, Leigh said.

The tax revenues that Lincoln Heights received were half the amount per student of the rest of the county. The inadequate funding resulted in fewer resources and low-quality facilities, she said.

Leigh said the title of her book comes from a saying that symbolizes something dirty contaminating something pure.

“White racists saw themselves as pure ointment and blacks as the flies contaminating it,” Leigh said. “There always seemed to be an effort to isolate and exclude blacks from participating in the rich industry and educational opportunities.”

Leigh said that despite growing up in Lincoln Heights, she was not fully aware of the problems facing the public schools. She had attended parochial schools in a wealthy community.

“Growing up in a community built out of intense racism actually protected me from racism in a sense,” Leigh said. “I was surrounded only by people who cared about me.”

Ann Thompson, interim associate dean of the Center for Technology Learning and Teaching, was Leigh’s major professor when she began studying the resource discrepancies between the two districts during graduate school. She thinks the book will help people realize the inequalities that have existed in the public school system.

Leigh will hold a book signing at 2 p.m. Jan. 23 at Big Table Books and will appear in a televised interview on the CBS affiliate in Cincinnati on Dec. 26.