In the late 1960s and early 1970s, St. Paul, Minnesota, underwent a protracted and at times highly charged school-segregation controversy. This study examines how the encounter between patterns of de facto school segregation arising from a history of de facto housing segregation in St. Paul and the process whereby integration of elementary and secondary schools was resolved. As Foster, a Chicago lawyer active in public-interest class action litigation, noted (172) in 1963, "problems raised by de facto segregation are more sophisticated and more subtle, and they stem from complex causes." St. Paul was typical of this situation, inasmuch as housing and employment patterns had the effect of concentrating minorities in poor neighborhoods with poor nearby schools and facilities. In these neighborhoods, there were fewer property owners, fewer property taxes paying for that target nearby schools. What Maslow, author of two books on school desegregation in New York City, explained (154) about New York city, that northern metropolitan-area ghettos "create school populations that for all practical purposes are almost completely segregated," was true of St. Paul, one of the northern cities where roughly one-half of all American blacks lived by the 1960s. In the context of the 1960s civil rights movement that had evolved after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education the South had been targeted for social transformation by civil rights activism, anti-segregation court decisions, and other laws in ways that the North had not. Now it was the North's turn. Now it was St. Paul's turn.
In overturning the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown conceptually collapsed equality before the law, specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, into equality in the context of social experience more generally. Throughout the 1960s, multiple projects of social reform sought to close the gap between Brown and well-entrenched patt...