Suburbanizing Jim Crow: The Impact of School Policy on Residential Segregation

Karen Benjamin

An extensive literature documents the historical process of suburbanization, residential segregation, and the popularity of restrictive covenants in the early twentieth century. Yet, the importance of local school policy in facilitating and driving that process remains a neglected area of research. Over the last century, school policy and housing markets shaped each other so extensively that a line cannot be drawn between them. This argument is particularly relevant for southern cities during the period of rapid urbanization between World War I and the Great Depression. During the school construction boom of the 1920s, southern school boards manipulated school site selection to create residential segregation in cities with previously integrated housing patterns. According to municipal documents, school board minutes, and local newspapers, board members in Houston, Raleigh, Atlanta, and Little Rock placed the newest and most expensive white schools in outlying suburbs with racially restrictive covenants. Meanwhile, they placed black schools in older neighborhoods rather than the newer suburban developments popular with the black middle class. Since schools helped determine where people lived, these policies helped pull white residents from integrated areas to all-white suburbs and cement black residents in deteriorating neighborhoods. As a result, previously vibrant, integrated spaces became politically isolated and economically depressed ghettos. Moreover, board members selected many of these sites over the ardent protests of both black and white residents, belying the myth that “de facto” segregation was at play. Neither the process of school site selection nor the outcomes of residential segregation reflected democracy.

About Karen Benjamin

Karen Benjamin is assistant professor of history and coordinator of the history and social science education program at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated with a Ph.D. in History and Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 2007. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth-century U.S. history, the historical construction of race, the history of American education, the history of the U.S. South, and grassroots reform movements. Her current research project developed from a case study of a 1920s school building program in Raleigh, North Carolina, that continues to shape the city’s racially segregated housing patterns to this day. Her forthcoming article “Suburbanizing Jim Crow: The Impact of School Policy on Residential Segregation” will appear in the Journal of Urban History (summer 2010) as part of a special issue examining the broader connections between schooling and suburbanization.