Suburbanizing Jim Crow

Abstract

During the 1920s, elites in southern cities capitalized on rapid population growth to heighten residential segregation through vast school building programs. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the board of education ignored popular protests when it relocated the district’s premier schools to new racially restricted suburbs on the city’s northwest side, knowing development would follow. Simultaneously, the board refused to build even a single school for the black middle-class suburbs located outside the heavily segregated southeastern section of town, despite numerous requests. The legacy of these school board actions shifted the city center northwest of Capitol Square and left black communities on the southeast side economically and politically isolated from the rest of the city. When Raleigh faced court-ordered busing in 1971, black and white students lived on opposite sides of downtown. As a result, meaningful integration had become an impossible task without extensive busing, as was true in metropolitan areas across the nation.