Changes After Desegregation of Public Schools
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It is a commonplace of American history of the 1950s and 1960s that the desegregation of public schools mandated by Brown v. Board of Education exerted a dramatic effect on social experience. The civil rights movement of the 1960s emerged in significant part out of that 1954 decision. By and large, the movement focused on where it began: the South, where beginning in the 1880s a whole range of laws meant to exclude blacks from everyday white social experience had been put on the books. The origin of the term describing that dynamic--the Jim Crow laws--is obscure, but the effect was to segregate public venues of all kinds, including transportation. In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that legislation was powerless to erase what it took to be racial instinct, which was held to belong to a different category from equality before the law (Kluger 73ff). Brown overturned Plessy, the apotheosis of de jure segregation, conceptually collapsing equality before the law specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment into equality in the context of social experience not specifically mentioned by that Amendment.Education, per Brown, was the experience under review. But it turned out that so was access to public accommodations, the vote, public transportation, housing, and employment opportunities. By the 1960s, projects of social reform sought to close the gap between Brown and well-entrenched patterns of segregated social experience on a range of issue fron
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terns in the North, the conceptualization of race relations was qualitatively different from that of the South. To put it in the lexicon of the contemporary vernacular, the white power structure in St. Paul, including but not limited to the school board, was either concealing or in denial about its racist attitudes and its endorsement of racist social patterns. In either case, the practical effect was to complicate and lengthen the process of achieving meaningful policy change that would foster meaningful equality of social, housing, and educational opportunity based on race. The St. Paul case, indeed, vividly demonstrates the wisdom informing Dr. King's meditation on his failure in the North (Chicago):
For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values (King 188-9).
Values, of course, inform practical experience, and the elusiveness of values change in St. Paul in the late 1960s is difficult to overstate, given the tone of segregation discourse of the period and the evidence of resistance to analysis of the racial structure of
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Approximate Word count = 1708
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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