Segregation Outside of the South

Yesterday we took a look at the grave of Elvis Presley, and I made a few remarks about his role on helping to end racial segregation in the United States.  While he was not one of those brave students who simply tried to walk to school in Little Rock or a very special woman who refused to take a seat all the way in the back of the bus when many of the front seats were open, he attacked the hind quarters of the beast of racism: de facto (rather than de jure), or passive segregation.  What is passive segregation?  Essentially, it is an unenforced apartheid wherein racial groups tend to stick to themselves, thinking that that the "other" people have either nothing to offer them, or at worst have an undesirable lifestyle.  Pretty much all of humanity experiences this, even in supposed havens of tolerance.  In Canada, for instance, French and English speakers did not really mingle amicably until the 1960's (and that is just a cultural divide).  In Mexico, some of the wealthier mestizos from the northern and central cities tend to look down on the "blanket wearing Indians" who live in Oaxaca or Chiapas.  In the United States, where segregation of races was actually enforced, things got a bit more extreme.

In the northern states, you would usually be hard pressed to hear about lynch mobs, everyone would drink at the same drinking fountain, and someone walking down Woodward avenue in Detroit in the 1950's was just as likely to be black as they were to be white.  All the same, different groups tended to actually live in their own neighborhoods, and by and large, your average church or school would pretty much be all black or all white.  Heck, until that same decade, some neighborhoods and their social institutions were pretty much all Polish or entirely of some other ethnic group!  No one thought much about it at the time; such people lived where they wanted to by choice, rather than law... or fear, right?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Because the United States had been taking in the rest of the world as immigrants, the country was a pretty diverse place, far more so than any other nation in history, save maybe Imperial Rome.  The concept took some getting used to, and then, as now, some groups were worried that their identity would be expunged by all the new groups melting together.

Warning: Soapbox Rant.

Today we have white Americans fearful of domination by Hispanics, who fear in turn that their kids are getting too comfortable with being Americans.  While that is a post for another day, I would have to tell my readers not to freak out from one side or the other.  English is here to stay, because if your kids play video games, and they do, they chat over microphones with people around the world in it.  The kids might speak Spanish at home, but so what?  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages, and they never forgot how to swear in English.  We might start eating more tacos, but we pretty much have been eating spaghetti and other assimilated foods for a century now, and coke, burgers, bacon and eggs, and steaks from Wyoming and Texas have yet to disappear.  Finally, no one likes paying more taxes, and this will be the thing that holds all true Americans together.  The point is, even in the north, we have tendencies to stick to our own folks, which is a choice, and is fine.  The downside of exclusivity is that we can erect barriers between one another accidentally out of choice, and not because we are actively racist.

End Warning.

While my first instinct is to point out 8 mile road in Detroit as a prime example of this behavior, the situation of passive segregation in that city, as well as in other rust belt cities like Buffalo, Gary, and Chicago, is a bit more complicated than simply pointing a finger at choices and blaming everything on our preferences. Instead, let's head over to Kansas, specifically to Topeka.  Now, Kansas has a history of disliking racism that started back in the decade before the Civil War when it was opened up to the concept of "popular sovereignty".  Basically, the state settlers got to choose if Kansas would allow slavery or not, simply by how many pro or anti-slavery people would move in.  It got pretty messy, needless to say.  In the end, the abolitionists won, and their victory was cemented in the Civil War.  Still, there were enough people of the opposite camp around that voiced their opinions in the state government who managed to enact laws that enforced racial segregation in schools.  In 1896, in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court of the United States confirmed their right to keep people separated, and any law in the United States that supported separate but equal facilities were upheld as legal.  Such laws were usually present and enforced only in the southern states, while most of the northern states forbade such laws as contrary to their individual constitutions.  Then there were states, most in the west, that had a sort of ambivalence about them, like Kansas.

Topeka, for the most part, was a pretty relaxed city that did not have a ton of racial tension.  Like most of Kansas, it welcomed freed slaves following the Civil War, and the city featured the first black schools to be founded west of the Mississippi.  When segregation laws did come around eventually, they were not much of a big deal, as the schools already tended to be de facto segregated just based on the demographics of the neighborhood.  Only the elementary schools were segregated, as Topeka High School had been integrated since it was founded in 1871. The schools were funded in equal measure with their white counterparts, and reportedly had good teachers and facilities.  One of the elementary schools still stands, and now serves as the centerpiece for Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site.

So what was the problem, and why did the court case I just mention get some press from sleepy Topeka?  Well, once World War II was over, the country started seeing a rapid expansion of its cities, owing to renewed prosperity and a ton of new automobiles being on the roads.  The American Dream started to include a nice house with a big yard that came with a larger commute time and neighborhoods being broken up as people headed for new, open areas of the city environs.  Topeka was no exception to this expansion, and all of sudden, some parents found that they did not have a school that they could legally send their children to, unless they wanted to send their kids all the way across town.  Some concerned parents found that the local legislature was uneasy about opening up a potential hornet's nest of racial warfare, and refused to properly attend to the situation.  One such parent, Oliver Brown, took the matter to the Supreme Court, where the justices were already reviewing similar cases from across the country.  In the end, Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned, and Topeka quietly adapted to the situation.  In the south, the situation was a bit less friendly...

Anyway, within a few decades, de facto segregation largely evaporated from much of the rest of the country.  People like Elvis helped to break down these barriers from a cultural standpoint, while people such as Brown took the challenge on a bit more directly.  Yes, we still have divides between people, but these days we are largely at a point where the matter is able to be talked about, and often, laughed over.  The challenges these days largely stem from a political corruption of the issues, which should not be a shock considering the age we live in.  What remains of race and class tension has in some ways become transformed into ideological polarization which feeds the existence of career politicians and the interest groups which support them.