THE border-states of Missouri and Kentucky currently present a picture of incomplete racial desegregation of the public schools. Roughly 64 per cent of the counties with Negroes in each of these states had started or had plans by May, 1957 for some racial integration in education. Questions immediately arise as to the possible differences between desegregating counties and those maintaining complete segregation. present paper relates this scattered design of segregated and integrated counties to three demographic variables. Two principal factors have been held by educators and social scientists as crucial in school integration: urbanism 1 and Negro ratio.2 third demographic variable, economic prosperity, is closely related to urbanism and Negro ratio and often cited as independently important in race relations. Urbanism as a facor in race relations was demonstrated by Raper in his classic work on lynching. Noting that a Negro inhabitant of a thinly populated southern county was in sixty times as much danger of mob death as a Negro living near a large southern city, he concluded that lynching was a rural phenomenon.3 Many reasons can be advanced for the expectation that desegregation will be positively related with urbanism. First, there is greater general liberality in urban areas. This is in turn related to a number of other crucial factors. Urban regions are typically prosperous than rural regions and economics have often been demonstrated as vital in race relations.4 Furthermore, urban areas in the South are less regionally oriented, subject to influences from outside the in short, more typically American. Also, urban communities are accustomed to rapid social changes of many types, some almost as sweeping as racial integration. final consideration involves the relatively separate and distinct Negro residence areas already existing in many southern cities. This separation will make it possible for these cities to officially integrate their schools without mass contact between the races.5 Contact that might result would largely involve lower class whites-the very whites with the least political power. Integration can come officially in urban regions, then, before integration must come in fact. percentage of Negroes in an area has been employed as an independent variable to predict a variety of southern phenomena. Key used Negro ratio as one of his principal tools in explaining the South's political structure, and Heer found Negro ratio to be positively related with the 1948 Dixiecrat party vote in the counties of South Carolina.6 In his summary of the research on prejudice, Allport concluded, The relative density of the minority group population . . . [is one of the] socio-cultural conditions that seem to make for prejudice. 7 intervening variable presumably underlying these relationships is perceived threat. Mississippi and the Union of South Africa are illustrations. Based on these ideas, Negro ratio was presumed to be a key variable in school integration. Public opinion poll data support this contention. One investigator noted that attitudes toward desegregation of Southerners 1 Frank P. Graham, The Need for Both Wisdom and Good Faith, Virginia Quarterly Review, 31 (Spring, 1955), pp. 192-212. 2 Guy B. Johnson, A Sociologist Looks at Racial Desegregation in the South, Social Forces, 33 (October, 1954), p. 8. 3 A. Raper, Tragedy of Lynching, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933. 4 Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, Lynchings and What They Mean, Atlanta, 1931. 5 Johnson, op. cit., p. 8. 6 V. 0. Key, Southern Politics, New York: Knopf, 1950; and D. M. Heer, Caste, Class, and Local Loyalty as Determining Factors in South Carolina Politics, (unpublished thesis), Cambridge: Social Relations Library, Harvard University. 7 G. WV. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1955, p. 227.