The “Intact Busing” Program in 1960s St. Louis Public Schools District

School Desegregation in the SLPS District

Clarence Lang has conceptualized the role of region in the 1960s civil rights movement narratives. He has argued strongly in favor of the necessity of regional specificity in black freedom histories. It is Clarence Lang’s contention the North and the South appear more alike than distinct, even though the conditions of black racial oppression have been articulated the sharpest in the South (the former eleven confederate states). ⁴ One likeness is the two regions’ opposition and resistance to public school desegregation, although in St. Louis, school officials undertook desegregation differently from its counterparts in other former slave states. “From the standpoint of regional typologies, the ‘border South,’ [especially] St. Louis, Missouri . . . also matters in the effort to locate narratives of the local black freedom struggle.” ⁵ This narrative details one manner, “intact busing,” in which the Board opposed desegregation in the SLPS district. Antiblack political and social governance has not been found to exist exclusively in the former slave states, but rather endemic nationally. ⁶

The Board did not implement the intact busing program in the early 1960s to fulfill an aspect of its managed integration plan or to achieve desegregation. Instead, the Board, accustomed to Missouri state law that sanctioned segregation in its public schools since 1875, and committed to its segregative neighborhood school policy, wanted no part in disturbing the homogeneous nature of undersubscribed segregated in practice white-enrolled elementary schools within the SLPS district. ⁷ Classroom space existed in the undersubscribed elementary school buildings in formerly Board-designated white schools because of declining white population and student enrollment. The still segregated exclusively black-enrolled elementary schools continued to be overcrowded due to the ever expanding black population in St. Louis because of blacks’ attraction to the city during the Great Migration and St. Louis City’s racial residential containment of black citizens. ⁸ Amy S. Wells and Robert L. Crain wrote, “This centralized state [Missouri] and its quintessential city [St. Louis] have repeatedly reminded Americans of inherent contradictions in our nation’s efforts to eliminate racial inequality.” ⁹ Faced with the challenge to comply with the Brown decision and the Board’s own managed integration plan, the SLPS district did not engage or enact any action to fulfill the second and third steps of the SLPS district’s managed integration plan. The neighborhood school concept, favored by blacks and whites, represented an excellent attendance policy for the elementary schools of the district, but a social challenge for school officials to successfully integrate the elementary schools of the district.

Robert A. Sedler, a St. Louis University law professor opined, “The type of racial discrimination found in St. Louis as more vicious than the type found in the former confederate states. In his opinion, racial discrimination in St. Louis was comparatively subtle. It was officially deplored, but privately countenanced.” ¹⁰ A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial acknowledged the racial residential containment of the black population in St. Louis.

The fact is the Negro population in St. Louis is centered in a dense band stretching from the river to the city limits . . . pupil population in that band substantially exceeds the capacity of the [elementary schools] neighborhood schools within it. ¹¹

Regarding the matter of school attendance zones and the Board’s commitment to the “neighborhood school policy,” there was no automatic neighborhood. What constituted a neighborhood for school purposes defined what school officials classified as a neighborhood.

To address the ever-present overcrowded issue in the black elementary schools, for September 1959, the Board, acting upon the recommendation of its administrative team, began to house black seventh and eighth grade students in the overcrowded Beaumont High School, McKinley High School, and Vashon High School (Vashon) buildings and dubbed these locations as Elementary Centers. ¹² Beaumont High School, a Board-designated white high school prior to the Brown decision, became a majority black-enrolled high school after the Brown decision and subsequent White Flight, white St. Louis city residents’ response to racial change. Vashon, a Board-designated black high school prior to the Brown decision, and McKinley High School, also a former Board-designated white high school which had increased its black enrollment after the Brown decision, presented social comfort for the Board in its placement of black elementary students in the Elementary Centers. The Board had erected and opened Vashon in 1927 after black educational activists, organized as the Central School Patron’s Association, requested the Board establish a second black high school east of Grand Avenue. ¹³

In anticipation of a bond issue report to construct new elementary schools exclusively in the black residential areas of the SLPS district, the Board temporarily added three additional Elementary Centers for September 1960: Hadley High School, Soldan High School, and Sumner High School. ¹⁴ Hadley High School and Soldan High School, Board-designated white high schools prior to the Brown decision, became predominantly black-enrolled after the Brown decision along with Sumner High School which had been the first black high school west of the Mississippi River in the SLPS district and has remained exclusively black-enrolled to date. ¹⁵ Before the Board’s response to the Brown decision in 1954, the Board maintained two technical high schools; Hadley for whites and Washington Technical for blacks. Under the provisions of the Board’s managed integration plan, all of the technical ninth graders, black and white, enrolled at Hadley Technical and desegregation of the upper grades, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, deferred until the completed construction of the new technical high school plant, O’Fallon Technical, in summer 1956. In September 1956, the four grade levels at the Hadley Technical and O’Fallon Technical facilities desegregated. However, the Board established a general high school curriculum, for a relatively small enrollment, predominantly black, at Hadley Technical. The Board utilized predominantly black-enrolled high schools to house the Elementary Centers. Subsequently, the Board presented a bond issue report for its capital improvement needs related to the overcrowded black elementary schools of the district.

The Board, unable to construct new elementary schools exclusively in the black community because of three failed attempts to pass a school bond issue in 1960, ¹⁶ began the transportation, intact busing, of black elementary students to formerly Board-designated white-enrolled undersubscribed elementary schools in the white residential sections of the school district to relieve overcrowding in the black elementary schools. ¹⁷ These attempts to fund school construction in the black residential areas amounted to covert Board efforts to delay the actual implementation of the Brown ruling. New schools in the black residential community would not have brought the SLPS district into compliance with the Brown mandate. Officially, in 1960, Board-designated black and white schools did not exist in the SLPS district due to the Board’s proposed compliance with the Brown decision, but the district’s schools remained segregated in practice because of the district’s policies and practices. One such practice, fragmentation, ensued in the SLPS district in lieu of de jure segregation. Fragmentation within a school district occurred when students from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds resided within the boundaries of the same school district, but have been segregated into separate buildings by school district policies and practices. ¹⁸ The Board’s implementation of its managed integration plan amounted to a clerical discontinuation of white and black (Negro) designations of school buildings in SLPS district records. Similarly, the Chicago Public School (CPS) system proclaimed a strict adherence to its neighborhood school policy and built two hundred schools exclusively in black residential areas between 1951 and 1962. ¹⁹

The Board’s intention to continue to utilize the neighborhood school policy spelled ultimate failure for the Board’s proposed managed integration plan. The segregated residential housing patterns in the city of St. Louis provided a natural barrier to an integrated school district utilizing the neighborhood school concept. During this period, the Board did not transport these students to achieve desegregation. Instead, the Board, committed to its segregative neighborhood school policy and antiblack political and social governance, wanted no part in disturbing the homogeneous nature of undersubscribed historically white-enrolled elementary schools. Classroom space existed in the undersubscribed school buildings in formerly Board-designated white schools because of declining white population and student enrollment. A prominent and longtime white member of the Board, Daniel L. Schlafly, has shared, “The Board knew whites opposed the presence of blacks in the [formerly Board-designated white] Southside schools [of the SLPS district].” ²⁰ The Board masked their busing program in an effort to appease the white citizenry.

The Black Freedom Struggle versus the Board

A coalition challenged the Board’s intact busing program and its related segregationist effect on the district’s elementary school students. The coalition, a

veritable who’s who of the local civil rights movement, included the West End Community Conference (WECC), St. Louis Urban League, St. Louis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the St. Louis Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). ²¹

Members of the WECC associated and advocated for some of the more progressive programs and organizations in the City of St. Louis. Specifically, membership in the WECC represented a place where white and black interests overlapped for the overall welfare of the formerly predominantly white West End section of the City of St. Louis. ²² White liberals in this group realized that some racial change had occurred in the West End and additional racial change inevitable. The efforts of groups like the WECC have been largely neglected in urban histories. ²³

The Board responded to civil rights leaders’ criticism of the “intact busing” arrangement. Subsequently, the Board defended the practice and held that classrooms as separate units could be administered more easily and that lunchroom and recreational facilities less strained if transported (black) and resident (white) children had different eating and recess periods; a dubious justification for the program and evidence of the Board’s continued antiblack political and social governance in the SLPS district after the Brown decision. ²⁴

The overcrowded status of the black elementary schools and its related black intrusion of transported black students, intact busing, into host exclusively white-enrolled elementary schools pleased neither blacks nor whites in the SLPS district. If the school bond issues presented to voters in 1960 had been approved, the Board planned to construct the elementary schools proposed in the bond report in the black residential areas and avoid busing and deviations to its segregative neighborhood school policy. Even so, the Board’s managed integration plan set forth in 1954 had failed to take affirmative action to fully desegregate the SLPS district. The Board attempted to mitigate the black intrusion into the undersubscribed former Board-designated white elementary schools with its intact busing strategy.

In the fall of 1961, the SLPS district Superintendent of Instruction Phillip J. Hickey (Hickey) responded to criticism of the busing program and appointed a three-member committee within the SLPS district to study the district’s intact busing procedure. Mrs. Margaret Bush Wilson, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, described the three-member committee as “phony” because the committee comprised employees of the SLPS district: James S. Scott director of the Turner Branch group of elementary schools, Mrs. Reba S. Mosby, assistant professor of sociology at Harris Teachers College, and R. M. Inbody, assistant superintendent of instruction in charge of secondary education. Hickey selected Mr. Scott to head the committee. ²⁵

Nevertheless, the president of the NAACP and others in the community continued to express doubt of the committee’s ability to operate with diligence and objectivity. This arrangement of the Board and its administrators precipitated the local chapter of the NAACP’s skepticism of the Board and its administrators’ ability to self-assess itself in an unbiased manner. This experience with the Board and its administrators likely led to the proposal in 1963 by the WECC, NAACP, and activists to request an independent committee to investigate its charges of segregative actions, intentions, and policies by the Board. A similar activity in Chicago, Illinois, a city and state which never enacted de jure segregation, occurred as civil right activists challenged the segregative conditions in the CPSs. The Chicago Board of Education (CBE), in the early 1960s, commissioned a panel of experts to study desegregation in the CPS. ²⁶

In an effort to placate blacks, with new school buildings, and whites, with continued maintenance of the segregative status quo of the SLPS district, on December 12, 1961, the Board again voted to submit a school bond issue to voters for construction of new elementary schools, exclusively in the black community, and the fire safety improvements required by the new St. Louis City ordinance which went into effect in 1959. For this election, the Board held joint elections with the City of St. Louis as the City of St. Louis also sought funds for a variety of capital expenditures. The city and school district shared common ground: two-thirds majority requirement for passage of the bonds.

Unexpectedly, the school bond issue failed again to receive the required two-thirds majority; a shortage of 175 votes. Board President Daniel L. Schlafly (Schlafly) expressed his disappointment tempered with a sense of responsibility, “Most immediately, of course, the school board must explore ways to bring our schools up to the standards demanded by the city’s fire safety ordinance. The law gives no choice but to comply.” ²⁷ In stating the Board’s desire to comply with law, the Board and its president obviously considered itself compliant with the Brown decision, which at this point had been the law of the land for seven years while the majority of the country along with the Board had been recalcitrant regarding the Brown decision’s implications. ²⁸

The school bond issue did not suffer defeat alone. Voters also defeated ten of the eleven city bond items. Schlafly called a special meeting of the Board to determine immediately the next course of action.

Raymond R. Tucker (Tucker), mayor of St. Louis siding with other local and public officials, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “I recommend modifying the state constitutional provision which prohibits cities and other local governments from issuing general obligation bonds unless approved by two-thirds of those voting on the issues.” In contrast, those who favored retention of the two-thirds majority argued, “A majority vote of 66.7 percent demonstrates that the proposed project has widespread community support.” ²⁹ Support for the two-thirds majority requirement stems from those who feel that real property bears an unfair share of the local tax burden.

St. Louis City citizens voted support of school bond issues in 1951 and 1955 to overcome the two-thirds majority requirement. ³⁰ In the recent election on January 23, 1962, the school bond issue came closest to the two-thirds majority requirement (66.7%) than the previous three failed attempts in 1960. The initial tally reported by election officials indicated a shortage of 175 votes for passage. The Board of Election Commissioners certified the official tally for the school bond issue as being only sixty-six votes shy of the two-thirds requirement. ³¹ Knowledge of this near miss encouraged school officials to go all out in the next election even if it meant without the city as a partner.

The Board voted, February 1, 1962, to resubmit its bond issue to the voters at a special election, March 6, 1962. For the Board’s continued segregative compliance and reliance on its neighborhood school policy, new schools represented an integral component. The March 6 election represented the fifth time the Board submitted substantially the same school bond issue to voters. The Board also approved an expenditure of $12,500 for public information purposes in connection with the election. ³² A special election required a quick decision because state law mandated notice of a special election must be published weekly for three consecutive weeks in advance of the election. ³³

On March 6, 1962, unofficial election returns showed 97,677 votes in favor of the school bond proposition, and 35,292 against it. The margin of victory tallied 9,031 votes. The funds from the 1962 bond issue also enabled the Board to fund the modifications required for school buildings to comply with the city fire safety code. ³⁴

The passage of the school bond issue endeared a personal triumph for Schlafly. Schlafly, cochairman of the school bond election committee along with Margaret Bush Wilson, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, led a diversity of community representatives on the election committee. Schlafly met with black citizens’ committees before the election to solicit their views on where each new school should be located to address the overcrowded issue and adhere to the Board’s neighborhood school policy. Election results indicated favorable majority of votes cast in favor of the bonds in the black wards. ³⁵ The diverse composition of the election committee led Schlafly to believe his collaboration with certain blacks represented the lone point of view shared by all blacks in the community.

When Margaret Bush Wilson and others alleged in 1963 that the Board and its administrators deliberately located the new schools to perpetuate segregation, Schlafly related he felt offended. As a source of rebuttal, Schlafly recalled,

Reverend John J. Hicks (Rev. Hicks) [a black Board member] had the moral courage to refute publicly the ridiculous allegations of Margaret Bush Wilson, William L. Clay, Sr., (Clay), a black St. Louis alderman, and others that the new schools had been deliberately located so as to continue to “ghettoize” black children. ³⁶

Many blacks, especially individuals active in the civil rights movement, made this conclusion because of the concentration of the new schools in thickly settled neighborhoods of blacks. Historian Clarence Lang reasoned black Board members had been voted in with the support of grassroots activism, but victory meant their incorporation into an entity with an entrenched culture of segregation. ³⁷ In several instances, Rev. Hicks spoke against the racial inequalities in the SLPS district. ³⁸

In 1959, Rev. Hicks became the first black citizen to be elected to the twelve-member Board. He polled second in a field of eleven candidates with 46,512 votes, while the popular Schlafly polled first with 50,664 votes. Rev. Hicks’s successful candidacy for Board membership signaled the first time a black citizen won election to the Board in St. Louis in a citywide vote after several attempts dating back to 1921. ³⁹ A St. Louis mayor had appointed a black citizen, Edward L. Grant, to the Board in 1949 and Walter A. Younge, in 1955. ⁴⁰

In 1963, the WECC accused/alleged the 1963 Board and its administrators of furthering segregation in spite of the managed integration plan implemented nine years prior in 1954. The WECC, a diverse community neighborhood group comprised of residents and business owners from the city’s West End, criticized the entire public school administration in a report mailed to all members of the Board in March of 1963. In the report, the WECC charged that the SLPS have been resegregated in the city’s West End because of the SLPS administrative policies. Of the more than one hundred charges alleged in its report, specifically, the WECC charged:

Through deliberate policies, the [Board] allowed white children to transfer from the area’s increasingly black classrooms to all-white schools in South St. Louis, thereby accelerating the rise in the proportion of black students in the rapidly changing West End; busing was not instituted to relieve the crowding until the schools were over 90% Negro; no human relations programs were conducted to insure that the bussed children were properly integrated into the receiving schools; this busing and overcrowding of Negro children in West End schools while transferring white children out of the district [attendance area] deprived both white and Negro families of the integrated education prescribed by the U.S. Supreme Court; and the location of new elementary schools could be used to continue to confine Negroes. ⁴¹

The WECC reference to new elementary schools related to the planned new construction of several elementary schools funded by the passage of the school bond in March 1962. ⁴²

The activist organization, St. Louis Ministers and Layman’s Association for Equal Opportunity in Education (STLMLA), coordinated protest demonstrations at Board meetings in April 1963. The group of ministers stopped short of taking a position to block the construction of the new schools. Instead, a spokesman said, “We must point out the dangers involved in building new schools in thickly settled neighborhoods of Negroes. Such schools will add to de facto segregation.” ⁴³

Clay addressed a special meeting of the Board on April 1, 1963, and alleged SLPS officials, specifically Hickey and William A. Kottmeyer (Kottmeyer), assistant superintendent of instruction in charge of elementary schools, guilty of either a premeditation or intentional program to cause and allow the increase of segregation in schools or have adopted policies conducive to resegregation of the school system. According to Clay, the Soldan High School attendance area/zone (located in the West End) had a white population of approximately 50 percent, while the school itself had a student enrollment of 99 percent black. To illustrate the gravity of the situation, Clay shared telling data relating to Hamilton Elementary School in the Soldan attendance area/zone. The last two graduating classes from Hamilton comprised an almost completely white student body. Yet, not a single white student from the classes had been enrolled in Soldan; insinuating the Board and its administrators possible involvement in this unlikely occurrence by granting permissive transfers to allow white students to transfer to predominantly white high schools within the district.

The United States Commission on Civil Rights report, published in 1962, found permissive transfers culpable in the “resegregation” of the SLPS district. White students and their parents utilized a permissive transfer known as the “German transfer rule” to transfer out of the Soldan High School attendance area/zone. The Board purposely did not provide a German instructor at Soldan High to facilitate such a transfer. ⁴⁴ In summary, Clay interpreted the actions of the Board through its Superintendent of Instruction as saying: (1) the resegregation is the result of housing trends and (2) district officials unwilling to make a white child attend a predominantly black-enrolled school (which Soldan High School had become). ⁴⁵ Under the Board’s governance since 1954, factual integration occurred only in the teachers college in spite of the Board’s publicly announced managed integration plan.

The Board Reacts

In a display of its sensitivity to the civil rights activist community, the Board responded to the recommendation of the activist organizations/individuals by voting eleven—one to authorize President Schlafly to appoint a twelve-member Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) to study the allegations and render a report. ⁴⁶ Schlafly appointed a biracial CAC to investigate charges brought by the WECC that the Board’s policies, procedures, or practices caused resegregation in the SLPS district. Schlafly also directed Hickey to provide the school district’s response to the allegations. ⁴⁷

Members of the black community criticized the CAC. An unsuccessful black candidate for the Board in 1953 spearheaded the criticism. ⁴⁸ The Rev. Dr. Joseph W. Nicholson (Rev. Nicholson), a former college professor in education and theology and member of the St. Louis branch of the NAACP’s education committee, respectfully criticized the CAC and its formation. Rev. Nicholson reasoned the CAC should have been comprised of some individuals “vitally concerned” with the issues rather than designating people on the basis of some other relationships in the community. He pointed out, “The delicate and important thing is, the good people selected to form the citizens committee were not recommended by the organizations making the charges on the 1st of April.” Referring to the citizens of the CAC as honorable and good people, Rev. Nicholson called for them to disqualify themselves and that a reconstituted committee set up based on the recommendations of the organizations making the allegations. ⁴⁹ His request fell on deaf ears.

While the CAC studied the issues surrounding allegations of resegregation within the SLPS district, a West End parents’ group, the Committee for Parents of Transported Pupils (CPTP), sent letters to the Board demanding immediate steps to assure that the transported black students, in the intact busing program, assigned and accepted as integral members of their receiving schools in classrooms, play activities, and lunchroom schedules. Civil rights organizations used pickets/public demonstrations and confronted the SLPS district policy of intact busing of black elementary school students to predominantly undersubscribed white schools in white residential neighborhoods. Leaders of the CPTP staged a partial blockade of buses scheduled to transport the black teachers/students unit in the Board’s controversial intact busing program. The blockade/demonstration obstructed twelve buses at Dozier Elementary School, 5749 Maple Avenue in the black residential community (West End). The group declined to block seven other buses transporting approximately four hundred black students. ⁵⁰ In spite of this demonstration, SLPS district administrators continued to insist that they segregated the black transported students in the intact busing program from white students at the receiving schools for administrative reasons.

Mrs. Donald M. Wells, whose husband chaired the CPTP, told a reporter the group made no attempt to block all of the buses at the school. She shared that each school day, 864 students are transported from Dozier Elementary School to seven different elementary schools in other parts of the school district (white residential areas). ⁵¹ Parents in the CPTP determined that they preferred refusing to send their children to school rather than subjecting their children to the psychological damage they suffered from the impact of the intact busing program. Mrs. Anne C. Voss, a white citizen and chairman of the WECC, added that the successful integration of black students from Riddick Elementary School at Rock Spring Elementary School, 3974 Sarpy Avenue as possibly an exemplar that a receiving school can conceivably absorb black transfer students in a nonsegregative manner. ⁵²

The SLPS district officials responded that unusual circumstances permitted the absorption of black transported students into classes at Rock Spring Elementary. They explained students from nearby Riddick Elementary, a five-minute bus trip to Rock Spring Elementary, enabled SLPS district administrators to maintain a single class schedule for all students. ⁵³ However, staffers of the United States Commission on Civil Rights reported the student enrollment at Rock Spring Elementary racially balanced—50 percent black, 50 percent white—and concluded that the SLPS district administrators felt more comfortable/less fearful of the black intrusion of racially mixed Rock Spring Elementary (host receiving school) with the all-black transported students from Riddick Elementary than with host receiving schools (all-white) in the exclusively white residential areas of the SLPS district.

In the midst of this controversy, Board members voted unanimously on June 11, 1963, to seek a declaratory judgment in federal court on whether the bus transportation policy (intact busing) conformed to United States Constitutional law. ⁵⁴ At this Board meeting attended by Miss June Shagaloff, the national NAACP education official in charge of leading the NAACP efforts to challenge school segregation outside of the locales in the United States which had de jure segregation in public schools prior to the Brown decision; an effort by the NAACP to address de facto segregation. Miss Shagaloff had worked with Kenneth Clark, who was noted for the doll experiments cited in the Brown case. Miss Shagaloff accompanied by several hundred local protesters carrying signs and singing hymns outside the Board headquarters, addressed Board members, “The St. Louis School Board is maintaining a system extensively and rigidly segregated.” In a press conference after the Board meeting, Miss Shagaloff told the press, “They [the Board] would no longer be permitted to attribute de facto segregation to neighborhood housing patterns and natural barriers.” Miss Shagaloff also criticized the Board for “abusing the intent” of the neighborhood school concept. ⁵⁵

Board members, after heated debate, voted unanimously to seek a declaratory judgment in Federal Court on whether the intact busing program conformed to provisions of the United States Constitution. A proviso stipulated that the suit would not be filed until June 20, 1963, the target date the CAC had promised to submit its final report. One Board member pointed out that the policy of transporting students from overcrowded schools in self-contained units had been in effect before the Brown ruling as if he did not understand the Brown ruling changed political and social governance in the public school districts of the nation. He echoed SLPS administrators’ explanation that the program was not based on convenience, but on the need for orderly educational administration. ⁵⁶ Days later, the protest community refused to meet with a few Board members and the Mayor.

The CAC Decision

The CAC addressed segregation in the SLPS district in a thirty-page final report submitted to the Board June 20, 1963. The CAC recommended changes in Board policies to promote maximum integration in the SLPS district. The twelve-member biracial CAC urged the integration of teachers on all school faculties, recommended that elementary “feeder” schools for Beaumont and Central high schools have integrated student bodies, and redrawing of school attendance areas/zones for schools in areas adjacent to black residential areas to achieve student integration. The CAC also pointed out that only 28 percent of elementary schools and 75 percent of high schools have integrated faculties which resulted in missed opportunities for schoolchildren to be taught by teachers of a different race, particularly in certain neighborhoods. ⁵⁷ In remarks to the St. Louis community, Professor/attorney Sedler had posited,

The Negro children are being taught only by Negro teachers, which condition clearly can cause feelings of inferiority. He [the Negro] is in the minority and is being told by the state that he can be taught only by people of his own race.” This action does not prepare him to live in an integrated society. The Board must reassign teachers in such a way as to eliminate all Negro faculties at predominantly Negro schools. This is not to say that there must be any stated balance, but only that there must be some integration on those faculties. ⁵⁸

The Hauser Report, commissioned by the CBE to investigate its school district’s desegregation policies, found similar conditions in the CPS and made nearly the same recommendations regarding faculty integration. ⁵⁹

Regarding the practice of intact busing, the report recommended the complete integration of black students transported by bus from overcrowded black-enrolled schools into classrooms and extracurricular activities of the predominantly white-enrolled receiving schools. However, the Rev. Trafford P. Maher, S. J., chairman of the CAC stressed integration of the transported students should adhere to the “principle of ability grouping.” Transported students whose educational ability is comparable to that of students in the existing classrooms should be absorbed into classes at the receiving schools. Speaking for the CAC, Father Maher supported the retention of transported students, with lower educational ability, in the self-contained units at the receiving schools. ⁶⁰

The CAC report acknowledged the critical need for new school buildings and noted that the Board should continue with their construction insofar as is possible on sites through which integration is made a reality. The CAC also recommended adoption of an open enrollment policy as an addition to the Board’s existing neighborhood school concept. The CAC proposed that after students living in a particular neighborhood are assigned to the nearest school, students from other areas have the right to request a place in classrooms with vacant seats. The report emphasized that school administrators must monitor the open enrollment concept to ensure it is not used to thwart school integration. ⁶¹

Instead of embracing the CAC proposals, the Board decided to hold open public hearings for public comments/input into the CAC recommendations; an attempt to gauge whites’ comments regarding full integration in the district and its potential end to antiblack political and social governance. Black leaders assailed the Board’s decision to hold public hearings as a stalling tactic and demanded immediate implementation of the CAC recommendations. Dr. Jerome Williams, speaking for eleven black organizations (protest community) questioned the need for the hearing saying: “It is our honest conviction that the Board should act favorably in carrying out the recommendations of the citizens’ committee [CAC].” ⁶²

White citizens, who addressed the Board, opposed integration measures proposed by the CAC. For example, the Public Schools Patrons Alliance, a white group representing fifteen school patrons’ organizations, demanded the Board make public the academic records of the transported students in an effort to justify their opposition to full integration of the transported black students in the intact busing program. ⁶³ This attempt, to disregard the confidentiality of black students’ school records, illustrated whites’ antiblack political and social governance in 1963. Congress subsequently provided the legal solution to this situation. The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law enacted in 1974, provided parents or “eligible students” certain rights with respect to a student’s educational records. ⁶⁴ Twenty-five persons addressed the orderly meeting with the exception of infrequent cheers or boos from the audience.

The Board held just the one public hearing regarding the CAC recommendations and afterward voted to cancel any additional public hearings, perhaps fearing the creation of a hostile situation by white St. Louisans that might mirror the violence occurring in other locales regarding blacks’ pursuits of liberatory outcomes during this period. Hickey announced that he planned to focus on three major recommendations of the CAC: (1) absorbing black elementary students into predominantly white receiving schools in the intact busing program, (2) redrawing some school attendance areas/zones, and (3) integration of faculties. ⁶⁵

At the Board meeting July 23, 1963, Hickey stubbornly clung to his preference for the intact busing arrangement which he declared as “the most practicable procedure available.” ⁶⁶

He presented a sixty-four-page report on the CAC recommendations for integration in the SLPS district. Rev. Hicks and James E. Hurt (two of three black Board members) criticized Hickey’s report. In the report, Hickey rejected the integration of nearly five thousand transported black students of the intact busing program into the classrooms of the all-white receiving schools, requested continued “voluntary” faculty integration in the SLPS district rather than the explicit teacher integration recommended in the CAC report, and opposed any redrawing of school attendance areas/zones, all of which were realistic paths to full integration in the SLPS district. Within the Board’s managed integration plan since 1954, voluntary faculty integration had been held to a minimum due to white teachers’ resistance to teaching black students in the K-12 curriculum. Mrs. Idella Smiley, the third black Board member who had been recently elected to the Board in April 1963, charged that Hickey’s sixty-four-page report “an elaborate sophisticated policy for continuation of Jim Crowism in the public school system.” ⁶⁷

Hickey further requested the Board vote immediately to approve/disapprove his plan for integration so that school administrators could begin the implementation for the upcoming school year. Schlafly enabled the Board to facilitate Hickey’s request by calling a special meeting July 26, 1963, to consider and vote for the plan, that if approved, the NAACP threatened to file suit and stop. ⁶⁸ This request, regardless of how the Board voted, signaled to white teachers that the superintendent shared their majority workplace view.

On Friday July 26, 1963, at the special meeting of the Board while protests and demonstrations occurred outside of the Board headquarters building, the Board, after debate and discussion, voted eight to three and approved a slightly modified version of Hickey’s plan. The black Board members cast the three dissenting votes. The modified version assimilated only several hundred transported black students in white receiving schools in the intact busing program. In its original version, Hickey’s report rejected the possibility of absorbing more of the transported students because of an insufficient number of available busses, disparities in educational achievement, and age differences. In a spirited exchange with Hickey, black Board member James E. Hurt informed Hickey that he had communicated with private bus companies who assured him of the availability of the busses required for Board usage. ⁶⁹

In a statement to the press released at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, July 27, 1963, Schlafly reiterated the Board’s support of its long-term superintendent of instruction:

The threats of protest actions grow from Superintendent Hickey’s excellent recommendations, which the Board adopted Friday. In approving the recommendations, the Board of Education acted in good faith to carry forward its unanimously adopted policy of achieving “maximum integration consistent with sound educational principles and responsibilities.” Further, under its integration policy, the Board will regularly review progress in all areas of integration. ⁷⁰

The majority-Board preference for resistance to public school desegregation centered on the expectations of white citizens in much the same manner as it did in the rest of the United States. ⁷¹

The Board did not end the intact busing program in the SLPS district until the fall of 1965 but failed to integrate black and white students in the south side of the SLPS district. ⁷² Instead, between 1964 and 1967, the Board erected and opened nine new elementary schools in all-black neighborhoods in its attempt to resolve the overcrowded conditions. Segregated housing patterns lead to segregated schools. ⁷³ Still facing overcrowded conditions in several black-enrolled elementary schools because of the city’s racial residential segregation and the school district’s segregative neighborhood school policy, the Board, in 1965, transported black children to predominantly black-enrolled schools near the federal low-income housing complexes (projects). ⁷⁴ Segregation of public schoolchildren, black and white, continued in the SLPS district.

Discussion/Conclusion

St. Louis, an uncertain mixture of North and South in terms of politics and culture, reflected traditional liberal politics regarding blacks; a preference for incremental change versus sweeping transformative change from the antiblack political and social governance. ⁷⁵ The K-12 division, specifically elementary schools, of the SLPS district remained factually a segregated school district well into the 1960s. Moderation and gradualism too often meant inaction. The Brown ruling’s unanswered questions allowed for conflicting answers: Which schools were racially separate? What constituted equality in the public schools? How might integration be accomplished? Thomas J. Sugrue has argued the Brown decision’s meaning legally and politically up for grabs. ⁷⁶ To comply and implement, the Brown decision required the Board and the white citizenry to accept political and social change and forgo racial discrimination. Frank Wilderson reasoned the relations of power between whites and blacks did not change with the Brown decision. ⁷⁷ Racial discrimination is not an accident, but rather a phenomenon which federal and state law designed, implemented, and upheld. ⁷⁸

Colin E. Gordon’s research has detailed racial segregationist attitudes and efforts in St. Louis, Missouri, dating back to the early 1900s. Gordon’s work, Mapping Decline adds impressively to the history of school desegregation and racial disparities in the St. Louis area by examining the underlying demographic changes that, intersecting with powerful policy initiatives, led to entrenched antiblack racism. Gordon’s work allows for deeper and more nuanced analysis of racialized school effects than could have been previously undertaken. ⁷⁹ Our work contextualizes Gordon’s work by placing white citizens’ longstanding prejudicial attitudes in St. Louis in the reexamination of the uneven progress of public school desegregation nationally.

In defense of the Board’s adoption of Hickey’s antiblack pro-segregationist plan regarding intact busing, Schlafly referred to the Board’s intent to have its integration policies evaluated by seeking a declaratory judgment in federal court, undoubtedly aware of the recent favorable ruling in federal court in a similar circumstance in Gary, Indiana. ⁸⁰ In that case, minority children claimed that the city of Gary, Indiana, operated a segregated school system by not forcibly integrating neighborhood schools where the makeup of the neighborhood was predominately one race or another. The city claimed that it transferred minority children from overcrowded schools into predominately white schools where necessary, but that wholesale transfer for the sake of full integration was too complicated and created unnecessary costs and safety concerns for the children. The district court dismissed the complaint on a finding that the safety concerns were real and that the school district boundaries had been drawn without discriminatory motive. The Court affirmed the judgment of the district court dismissing the minority schoolchildren’s complaint that alleged that the city operated the school system in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Board president self-righteously declared, “If the court tells us to change them in some way, we shall of course comply.” ⁸¹ Schlafly’s self-righteous remarks conspicuously neglected to note that after a study of the Board’s and its administrators’ integration policies by the CAC, the majority-Board voted to essentially reject the CAC’s reasonable recommendations for full integration in the SLPS district.

The 1954 Board, of which Schlafly officially participated, decided to comply with the original Brown decision. This political stance regarding the rights of blacks reminds us of the political stance decided by white Missourians for the Civil War conflict. Then, the Missouri legislature voted to remain in the Union but experienced instances with white Missouri citizens who sympathized with the confederate cause—the extension of the institution of slavery. Similarly, after the Civil War, Missouri chose to politically, socially, and legally align itself with the former confederate states in crafting legal segregation of the races. Thus, in addressing the Brown decision, citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, along with officials of the SLPS district encountered disgruntled white citizens (covert protesters) who claimed that they occupied a higher level of citizenship than blacks.

In a preemptive measure to the planned lawsuit by the NAACP, the Board went forward with its suit to seek a declaratory judgment regarding its intact busing policy. The Board sought to have its obvious school segregation, intact busing, declared legally and morally innocent. The Board also sought an injunction restraining black individuals and civil rights organizations from interfering with the intact busing program in response to blacks’ threat to boycott the schools in September 1963.

In an editorial by the St. Louis American, the black weekly newspaper critical of the segregative nature of intact busing, reasoned,

It is quite apparent that the School Board is going into court not alone for a clarification of the law as applied to its dilemma of daily shipping more than four thousand pupils to schools where they are “Jim crowed,” but that it is really playing for time—perhaps as much as two years before a final decision can be handed down. ⁸²

The newspaper editorial proved prophetic as the Court ruled it is incumbent upon a school board to establish that its proposed desegregation plan promises meaningful and immediate progress toward disestablishing state-imposed segregation (Green et al. v. County Board of New Kent County et al.). ⁸³ The Board’s subtle defiant politics of the Brown decision had persisted nine years after the Board’s self-declared compliance with its cautious managed integration plan. The political and social convenience of subtle resistance to desegregation in the SLPS district had brought few changes to the district’s social structure. However, the structural legacies of the dual educational system and the fundamental inadequacies in the subtle approach to race relations meant that almost 90 percent of black students remained in segregated schools akin to similar situations in other former slave states. ⁸⁴

On August 15, 1963, Hickey suffered a stroke resulting in his hospitalization and disability. This unfortunate occurrence deprived the SLPS district of his experienced leadership in a tumultuous social/racial period. Reportedly, Hickey and his administrative team, in 1954, authored the managed integration plan. ⁸⁵ Hickey and his administrators, with the approval of the Board, implemented a minimalist desegregation model. Hickey resolutely decided to support the white community’s resistance to desegregation of the public schools in defiance of the black freedom struggle for integrated public schools. Research studies of desegregation have exposed the role of educational authorities who facilitated a key part in upholding student segregation. ⁸⁶

On August 20, 1963, the St. Louis branch of the NAACP filed its lawsuit accusing the Board and school administrators, Hickey and Kottmeyer, of operating a segregated public school system. The suit contended the defendants “purposely and designedly” adopted a policy of racial containment and intentionally contained or limited black students to certain schools and facilities “in an effort to minimize the racial integration of students and teachers within the school system.” Referring to the new elementary schools being built, the suit charged that the Board and its administrators “embarked upon a wasteful and extravagant expenditure of public funds to build new schools, when many classes in schools throughout the city [SLPS district] were not filled to a reasonable capacity.” ⁸⁷ The St. Louis branch of the NAACP would later drop the lawsuit against the Board after deciding that some gains had been accomplished in the SLPS district and that carrying the lawsuit into federal court would be costly.

The Board continued the intact busing program into the next school year 1963/1964 and terminated it in 1965 after the Board completed the construction and opening of eight elementary schools in the black residential areas of the SLPS district in September 1964. These schools helped to eliminate the Board’s need for the intact busing program, but did not lead to integration compliant with the Brown decision. ⁸⁸