Building Inequality

Abstract

This article examines how school and municipal planning practices contributed to segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods well after Brown. In Nashville, Tennessee, a consolidated city–county municipality, federal urban renewal and housing initiatives and federal education guidelines linked with local practices to favor suburban space, neglect urban space, and reinforce segregation in both housing and schooling. School construction policies served the interests of suburban real estate development and helped to concentrate poor black children and families in the central city. The range of policies and market forces at work in linking schools and housing proves the falsity of the de jure–de facto framework courts and historians often applied to school segregation. An uneven distribution of educational resources shaped over decades by local and federal policy led to an uneven distribution of the burdens that came with busing, an inequality made to seem normal by spatial ideology that favored the predominantly white suburbs.