172 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 42: No. 4 is no ongoing national assessment of these plans. Not even the relatively simplistic kinds of data used in the 1966 Coleman Report are now being systematically collected. In order to obtain more useful information from social scientists, research-and more adequately funded research-must be undertaken on general urban trends that will shape the context within which desegregation issues should be considered. Congress should direct HEW to initiate a long-term multidisciplinary assessment of the desegregation process to gain an understanding of the conditions under which desegregation works best. Those federal agencies that have sponsored research and evaluation studies recently180 have done a poor job of disseminating them to the academic community. This research, which contains important evidence of some of the factors that make desegregation succeed or fail at the school level, has not had much impact on policymakers or the academic research community. The first step-federally-sponsored conferences, seminars, and workshops on these and similar studies would be useful both in expanding ways of thinking about the desegregation process and generating discussion that could help shape priorities for a national assessment of the desegregation process. The second step is to initiate research on the relationship between the effects of school desegregation and other urban policies. Federal and local housing authorities in several communities have been found guilty of intentionally segregating portions of the housing market. As the courts attempt to remedy both kinds of segregation and as civil rights groups, in order to prove a constitutional violation in a school desegregation case,' 181 use evidence that neighborhoods were intentionally developed in a way that guaranteed segregated schools, research on the interaction between governmental housing and school policies is needed. Such research might also aid in shaping mutually reinforcing remedies for both segregated schools and housing. If research is to play a more useful role, researchers must recognize that some of the serious wounds of the recent controversies have been selfinflicted. Researchers who find themselves in the unusual and understandably gratifying position of being asked for advice on issues of general social policy often express their general value preference, though it may go far beyond the boundaries of existing research. Policymakers and journalists frequently do not understand the limitations of existing research and press for advice where 180. See, e.g., G. Forehand, M. Ragosta, & D. Rock, supra note 49. J. Coulson, National Evaluation of the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) (System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, 1976). The Coulson study was the first of a series of evaluation studies that studied the effect of desegregation in a sample of schools across the country over time. 181. See Taylor, The Supreme Court and Recent School Desegregation Cases: The Role of Social Science in a Period of Judicial Retirement, 42 Law & CONTEMP. PROB., Autumn 1978 at 37. Page 141: Autumn 1978] ANTIBUSING 173 no reliable information exists. On receiving information, they seldom sort out the components that rely on research evidence, those that express the researcher's current hypotheses, and those that merely reflect his value preferences as a citizen. Social scientists must operate with full awareness of these problems and make every effort to separate their roles as clearly as possible. At best, the relationship between academics and policymakers will be difficult. Selective perceptions of research findings and politically inspired misuse of data will continue. Careful, self-conscious handling of a complex set of responsibilities and a variety of audiences is essential to useful participation by social scientists in the policy arena. Judges and other public officials must have a more realistic understanding of the way academic researchers operate and the kinds of advice they are best equipped to provide. Developing a better relationship will require important changes in procedures and expectations. It is, however, the only way substantially to improve the quality of evidence available for making wise decisions about the future of race relations in enormously complex urban settings. LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS VOLUME 42 AUTUMN, 1978 NUMBER 4 DAVID L. LANGE, General Editor MARTHA L. REINner and Mary Buchanan Funk, Managing Editors I. TROTTER HARDY, JR., STEPHEN D. Kursman, Raymond F. MONROE, PHILIP COOK, ROBINSON O. EVERETT, JOEL L. Fleishman CLARK C. Havighurst, WILLIS D. HAWLEY, BETSY LEVIN, A. KENNETH PYE, SCHOOL DESEGREGATION: LESSONS School officials always ask why they should be required to cure problems of segregation that are, in part, due to housing policies. After a desegregation plan is implemented they often find that they still must cope with the racial consequences of housing and development decisions that may suddenly and drastically alter the enrollment patterns in part of a school district. It is obvious to virtually all participants in the school desegregation process that housing policies have an impact on schools, and that school segregation or desegregation may have an impact on housing choices. Early in the task of designing the school desegregation plan, as a court-appointed expert in the development of St. Louis desegregation, I met with officials from the city's Community Development Agency. Since the court order specified that residentially integrated communities could be exempted from busing, I asked whether there were plans to construct subsidized family housing (largely tenanted by blacks in St. Louis) in any of the city's segregated white attendance areas. There were none. Therefore, it was necessary to include all of these neighborhoods in the mandatory desegregation plan. Around the same time I looked at a number of the black schools under consideration for mandatory reassignment. In several cases it was possible to see subsidized family housing within view of the school yard. The federal government was paying for all-black housing on sites selected by local officials, sites which guaranteed segregated education. The cost of transporting students from those projects to the desegregated schools is a direct outgrowth of the decision to build ghetto housing. Achieving stable school integration requires an understanding of the dynamics of housing policies and the development of future policies that aid rather than retard stable integration. This paper will consider the following issues: 1) The degree to which the segregation of the schools may be related to housing decisions by officials in the city and the suburbs, 2) The extent to which decisions of this nature are still made today, 3) The possibility that existing housing and development plans may produce segregation in schools that are integrated under the new plan, 4) Types of cooperative school-housing relationships that could strengthen desegregation plans, 5) Long-range issues for the city, 6) Issues in the suburban sectors of the housing market, and 7) Recommendations. Public Policy and the Development of the St. Louis has always had black residents, even in the days of French and Spanish rule, but the development of a large and highly segregated black population in the city and certain suburbs is largely a twentiethcentury phenomenon. Government decisions and actions, both local and national, have had a strong impact on the city's racial patterns. Although the city was 25 percent black in 1830, the number fell to a low of two percent in 1860, in part because of the attraction of the free state of Illinois across the river and in part because a number of state laws restricted black property ownership, imposed other strict limits, and made it illegal to educate blacks, even the free blacks who paid taxes for the operation of public schools. Even after the Civil War the black population remained relatively small, about six percent until 1910. As the numbers grew to 44,000 in 1910, segregation increased. Restrictive covenants forbidding the sale of property to blacks, enforceable in local courts, were begun in 1911. "In a city-wide referendum in 1916," Norbury L. Wayman reports, "St. Louis became the first city to vote mandatory residential segregation into law."2 Although the law was overturned in the courts and the Supreme Court rejected such explicit zoning by race in a parallel case from Louisville, the statute was a reflection of local attitudes. Segregation in the city began to rise rapidly with the great migration of blacks to the city spurred by World War I. The war, which cut off the supply of immigrant labor and created a very severe industrial labor shortage, spurred active recruitment of Southern black workers, workers who were at the same time being pushed off the land by crop failures in the South. One reason for the black exodus to St. Louis and other cities, according to a leading contemporary student of the migration, was education. One reason "universally given" for leaving the South, according to Emmett J. Scott, was "the inability to educate their children properly." It was during the period of this migration that the modern ghetto system began to develop in many of the nation's large cities. When the migrants arrived in St. Louis, they found a city with many kinds of state-required segregation. The city had separate schools, separate parks, and separate restaurants and theaters.^ World War I brought a sudden increase of perhaps 10,000 people in St. Louis's black population at a time of very heavy and violent pressure for segregated housing. St. Louis was also directly across the river from the site of the worst race riot to grow out of the great migration (in fact, the worst race riot of the twentieth century), the July 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, which saw the virtually unpunished burning of 16 blocks of black homes and the killing in cold blood of dozens of blacks who received no significant protection from local police. The East St. Louis riot was related to the expansion of black housing into white areas and it created a national atmosphere of terror, reinforced by dozens of racial bombings in major cities. After the riot thousands of refugees walked across the bridge to St. Louis and many settled in segregated housing there. President Wilson refused appeals for a federal investigation of the riot." The development of the St. Louis ghetto was graphically described in 1920: There are about six communities in which the blacks have been added to all of the negro resi- of the whites. Few new houses have been built." Residential segregation became far more intense in the city. In 1910, the statistics showed that 54 percent of the blacks in St. Louis would have had to move to white areas to achieve random distribution of population by race, a figure like that of certain other immigrant communities. By 1920, however, the figure rose to 62 percent and by 1930 it shot up again to 82 percent. The level reached 93 percent in 1950 and 91 percent in 1960.7 The city developed a strong pattern of residential expansion by blacks only on the boundaries of established black residential areas. These expansions always led to resegregation and expansion of the ghetto. A study covering the 1930-1960 period, for example, identified no stable interracial areas in the entire city. It became the norm for blacks to be segregated in virtually all black neighborhoods and for integrated neighborhoods to always become part of the ghetto. History of St. Louis Housing St. Louis has one of the largest municipal public housing efforts and one which has included some of the most unsuccessful housing projects in the nation. The program has been continuously under criticism in recent years. Even after national hearings and investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in St. Louis on the question of housing segregation, the city has continued to receive substantial amounts of federal money to build segregated family housing. Since the initiation of housing programs, the vast bulk of subsidized family housing for the entire metropolitan area has been built in the black areas of St. Louis. Much of the rest is in black suburban areas. That pattern continues today and existing plans assure that it will continue into the future for at least several more years. These patterns insure that many of the most educationally deprived and poor children of the metropolitan community will have to be transported to school if they are not to attend schools that are severely segregated by both race and class. The St. Louis public housing record includes perhaps the most infamous housing project in the nation, Pruitt-Igoe, which opened in 1954 with 33 highrise buildings containing almost 2,800 apartments. Within five years the project had become a notorious scandal. Both a local grand jury and a committee appointed by the mayor were soon investigating its problems. It came to represent the worst mistakes in public housing, the most intense pathological kind of separation. A study by Washington University Professor Lee Rainwater concluded: ... no other public housing project in the country approaches it in terms of vacancies, tenant concerns and anxieties, or physical deterioration. Rather, Pruitt-Igoe condenses into one 57acre tract all of the problems and difficulties that arise from race and poverty and all of the impo 83-458 O 82 24 49 |