Racial Balance Research Articles

Improving Social Equity Within Public Organizations: Authority Differentials as Reference Points for Fostering Diversity and Inclusion Within U.S. Federal Agencies

Fostering diversity and inclusion (D&I) is a major challenge confronting the contemporary American administrative state. The asymmetric distribution of authority within U.S. federal agencies is critical for understanding employee perceptions of agency D&I efforts. Leveraging data from approximately 2.51 million U.S. federal employees across 105 agencies between 2010 and 2019, the statistical evidence demonstrates that authority differentials, reflected by the relative gender and racial balance of supervisory and non-supervisory personnel within U.S. federal agencies, predict employees’ evaluations of agency efforts at fostering D&I. Although these authority differentials have similar effects on employee D&I evaluations for both men and women, minority employees exhibit more sanguine assessments of agency D&I efforts than compared to non-minority colleagues predicated on such authority differentials. The statistical relationship between authority differentials and employees’ agency D&I evaluations is most pronounced for women minority employees, as well as for those holding supervisory positions.

The Tragedy of School Desegregation

Abstract The Crucible of Desegregation: the Uncertain Search for Educational Equality details the legal, social, and political history of school desegregation over the last century and half. The author describes the creation of the civil rights state, at the state and federal level, the continuing ambiguity of the term desegregation, the lack of support for mandatory reassignment by Black parents, the reluctance of school officials to apply for a termination of their court order, the effect of terminating school desegregation orders on racial balance and interracial exposure, and the failure of school desegregation to achieve the lofty goals its supporters pursued, of which eliminating the Black-white achievement gap was the most important.

Blacks in Niagara Falls: Leaders and Community Development, 1850–1985

Michael B. Boston's ambitious book, Blacks in Niagara Falls, complements a growing list of community studies of African American migration, leadership, protest, and community formation in a northern city. Although Boston fails to offer an engaging thesis, he demonstrates that, despite their small population, Black people, who resided in Niagara Falls since the antebellum era, fought vigorously for equal rights. The city's Black population, which numbered only 344 in 1900, established community institutions, a local newspaper, churches, and an energetic leadership class. Black Niagarans regarded themselves as part of the broader struggle for full equality in the United States. Niagara's Black community expanded significantly during World War II, mirroring the migration pattern of hundreds of urban communities, as Black wartime migrants sought greater freedom and employment in wartime defense industries. Boston reconstructs the journey of several migrants to Niagara Falls and details the expanded employment opportunities that awaited them. Boston argues that the growing population of Black migrants to Niagara Falls accelerated existing patterns of racial inequality and exacerbated the schisms within Black leadership. Most Black Niagarans were unskilled laborers, following the familiar pattern of Black wartime migration to other northern cities. Nevertheless, the expanding Black middle and professional class dominated the community's leadership by the 1950s and early 1960s, and these leaders served as liaisons between the Black and white community. Residential concentration and housing discrimination also grew more intense as the Black population expanded. Although Niagara Falls never developed a ghetto, Black people were concentrated in several residential areas with limited access to better housing. Niagara Falls's schools also achieved little racial balance, and two public schools had Black enrollments of 80 percent and 99 percent as late as 1968. Attempts to achieve a semblance of racial balance in public schools through bussing were vehemently opposed by most white parents. Niagara Falls resembled a moderate southern city such as Greensboro, North Carolina, which expressed support for integrating its public schools following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 but failed to fully integrate them for three decades.

The genealogy of social hatred

AbstractThe paper aims at providing an overview of hate crimes through an interdisciplinary lens based not only on theories but also empirical research results. The paper first deals with the central components of hate crimes: prejudice and aggression. Not only the classical social-psychological theories of these phenomena are discussed but also some newer ones. As hate crimes do not occur in a vacuum, the next chapter of the paper deals with the social, political, cultural context and factors that facilitate or impede the occurrence of hate crimes. Community disorganization, urban ecology, racial balance, residential stability, economic conditions, and the role of the media and the internet are discussed in detail. The last chapter of the paper deals with the perpetrators of hate crimes, let them be lonely ones or members of organized hate groups. The paper demonstrates that the investigation of hate crimes can only occur in an interdisciplinary setting that can simultaneously take into account legal, social, cultural, and political factors.

School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that had the effect of reducing the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools within counties. We divide these reductions in interracial contact into portions due to the private school and charter school sectors, the existence of multiple school districts, and racial disparities between schools within districts and sectors. For most counties, the last of these proves to be the biggest, though in some counties private schools, charter schools, or multiple districts played a deciding role. In addition, we decompose segregation in the state's 11 metropolitan areas, finding that more than half can be attributed to racial disparities inside school districts. We also measure segregation by economic status, finding that it, like racial segregation, increased in the largest urban counties, but elsewhere changed little over the period.

Social Inequality from the perspective of the Racial Balance Index

Brazil still has a long way to go in facing its deep social problems. In order to offer a new perspective on Brazilian inequality, this paper proposes to use the Racial Balance Index to reveal where the greatest and worst advances in the direction of racial equity lie. With this index it is possible to identify and monitor racial inequality in socioeconomic variables over time considering the local racial distribution. Thus, this work analyzes racial imbalances, by state and region, present in high schooling, in the elderly population and in groups with higher incomes. As a result, there has been a significant improvement in the educational situation in recent years. The racial imbalance in the population with higher education has decreased considerably. However, this has not yet been reflected in an improvement in racial inequality in earnings and longevity.

From Open Enrollment to Controlled Choice: How Choice-Based Assignment Replaced the Neighborhood School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

In 1981, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first school district in America to replace its neighborhood schools with a “controlled choice” assignment plan, which considered parental preference and racial balance. This article considers the history preceding this decision to explore how and why some Americans became enamored with choice-based assignment at the expense of the neighborhood school in the late twentieth century. It argues that Cambridge's problematic experience with open enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s created a vocal, consumer-oriented, and politically active class of parents who became accustomed to choice and, by the early 1980s, dependent on its benefits. Moreover, controlled choice proved especially attractive in this university community because Cambridge had a constituency of well-educated, middle-income parents who possessed the social capital to identify the best educational opportunities for their children, but lacked the economic capital to use real estate to gain access to their preferred schools.

Socioeconomic-Based School Assignment Policy and Racial Segregation Levels: Evidence From the Wake County Public School System

In the wake of political and legal challenges facing race-based integration, districts have turned to socioeconomic integration initiatives in an attempt to achieve greater racial balance across schools. Empirically, the extent to which these initiatives generate such balance is an open question. In this article, we leverage the school assignment system that the Wake County Public School System employed throughout the 2000s to provide evidence on this issue. Although our results show that Wake County Public School System’s socioeconomic-based assignment policy had negligible effects on average levels of segregation across the district, it substantially reduced racial segregation for students who would have attended majority-minority schools under a residence-based assignment policy. The policy also exposed these students to peers with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, higher mean achievement levels, and more advantaged neighborhood contexts. We explore how residential context and details of the policy interacted to produce this pattern of effects and close the article by discussing the implications of our results for research and policy.

‘The kind of things we’ve heard keep people in the district’: White racial exclusion and the evolution of school choice policies in Portland Public Schools

This policy history traces the evolution of Portland Public Schools’ school choice programme from the early 1970s until 2010 and examines its impacts on the historically black Albina neighbourhood. The purpose of this research is to identify the ideologies and assumptions that led to the establishment of the initial school choice programme and continued to influence decision makers as the programme evolved into a more neoliberal marketplace of schools. The district originally embraced controlled choice as a means to manage integration so it would not significantly tip the racial balance in predominantly white schools. By opting to make integration voluntary for students in predominantly white schools, the board legitimised white parents’ preferences for racially exclusionary school settings. In Portland Public Schools, white racial exclusion laid the foundation that shaped the technologies of the school choice programme as it developed into a more neoliberal iteration.

Algorithms, Correcting Biases

A great deal of theoretical work explores the possibility that algorithms may be biased in one or another respect. But for purposes of law and policy, some of the most important empirical research finds exactly the opposite. In the context of bail decisions, an algorithm designed to predict flight risk does much better than human judges, in large part because the latter place an excessive emphasis on the current offense. Current Offense Bias, as we might call it, is best seen as a cousin of “availability bias,” a well-known source of mistaken probability judgments. The broader lesson is that well-designed algorithms should be able to avoid cognitive biases of many kinds. Existing research on bail decisions also casts a new light on how to think about the risk that algorithms will discriminate on the basis of race (or other factors). Algorithms can easily be designed so as to avoid taking account of race (or other factors). They can also be constrained so as to produce whatever kind of racial balance is sought, and thus to reveal tradeoffs among various social values.

Suburbanizing Segregation? Changes in Racial/Ethnic Diversity and the Geographic Distribution of Metropolitan School Segregation, 2002–2012

Background While postwar suburban migration established suburbs as relatively affluent, homogeneous white enclaves distinct from the urban core, recent waves of suburbanization and exurbanization have been spurred largely by rapid growth in the nonwhite population. While these increases in suburban racial/ethnic diversity represent a significant evolution of the traditional “chocolate city, vanilla suburbs” dichotomy, scholars have expressed concern that they are worsening racial/ethnic segregation among suburban public school students. Objective In this study, we document shifts in the racial imbalance of suburban schools in terms of several racial/ethnic and geographic dimensions (i.e., multiracial, black–white; between and within suburban districts, among localities). In addition, we extend the urban/suburban dichotomy to provide initial evidence on changes in racial balance in metropolitan exurbs. Finally, we use inferential models to directly examine the impact of changes in racial/ethnic diversity on shifts in racial imbalance. Research Design Using demographic data from the National Center of Education Statistics Common Core of Data on 209 U.S. metropolitan areas, we provide a descriptive analysis of changes in segregation within and between urban, suburban, and exurban localities from 2002 to 2012. We measure segregation using Theil's entropy index, which quantifies racial balance across geographic units. We assess the relationship between demographic change and change in segregation via a series of longitudinal fixed-effects models. Results Longitudinal analyses indicate that increases in racial/ethnic diversity are positively related to change in racial imbalance. However, observed increases in diversity were generally insufficient to produce meaningful increases in segregation. As a result, suburbs and exurbs, like urban areas, experienced little change in segregation, although trends were generally in a negative direction and more localities experienced meaningful declines in segregation than meaningful increases. Findings are less encouraging for suburbs and exurbs than for urban areas and underscore the intractability of black-white racial imbalance and the emerging spatial imbalance of Asians and whites. We also document an important shift in the geographic distribution of segregation, with suburbs now accounting for a plurality of metropolitan segregation. Conclusions Contrary to previous researchers, we do not find evidence that suburban and exurban schools are resegregating, although we fail to document meaningful progress towards racial equity. Moreover, while suburbs are not necessarily resegregating, we find that segregation is suburbanizing, and now accounts for the largest share of segregation of any locality. We conclude with a discussion of recommendations for policy and research.

A new R-based statistical software package for fitting multivariate generalized linear mixed models to large and complex datasets

ABSTRACT
 ObjectiveTo demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the new freeware MGLMM in the statistical modelling of large and complex datasets.
 ApproachThe new R-based software MGLMM (shortly to become available on the CRAN website https://cran.r-project.org/) can be used to fit a range of different multivariate generalized linear mixed models, thereby permitting a better representation of the multivariate nature of many complex socio-economic processes which may involve a range of different response types. The software MGLMM will also set records for the time taken to fit these complex models to large sets of data. The efficiency and efficacy of this new software will be demonstrated by way of a number of applications.
 One such example will come from the STAR Project in which pupils were followed from kindergarten in 1985 (aged 5) to 1989 (third grade, aged 8). The pupils were assessed on their ability in both mathematics and English on an annual basis between 1985 and 1989. At the end of the kindergarten year, some of the students were reallocated to different class sizes in order ‘to achieve sexual and racial balance and to separate incompatible children’. In the fourth grade, the pupils returned to regular classes and the experiment ended.
 We can regard the two score variables ‘Maths’ and ‘English’ as constituting repeated, correlated, bivariate continuous data. We will use the new package MGLMM to apply a series of bivariate normal mixed models with correlated random effects. These models will allow us to distinguish the role of prior attainment in mathematics and English on current attainment in mathematics and English in an experimental setting, for pupils in small and regular class sizes. The models will permit an examination of the effect of class size on this bivariate response, whilst controlling for a set of individual-level confounding factors such as gender and age.
 ResultsWe will present the results of these analyses, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of MGLMM. We will also compare the performance of the new software with existing packages such as Stata.
 ConclusionsWe will have demonstrated the gain in efficiency through the use of MGLMM, compared to other standard software packages, in the statistical modelling of large and complex datasets.

Social Justice for the Advantaged: Freedom from Racial Equality Post-Milliken

Background/ContextIn Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan in Detroit that sought to achieve racial balance in part by busing white suburban students to the city's majority black schools. In a stark departure from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Milliken left the question of how, or even whether, to equalize education for black students up to local parents, educators, activists, school board members, state legislators, and other private and public community stakeholders.Purpose/Objective/Focus of StudyIn this article, I consider school desegregation as a form of social justice for blacks and racial equality for all, 40 years post-Milliken. Drawing from research on school desegregation as social justice and Bell's theory of interest convergence, I argue that integration and equality in the post-Civil Rights Era requires attention to the competing visions of social justice I describe as black equality and white freedom.Research DesignFramed by distributional and relational dimensions of social justice and Bell's theory of interest convergence, this paper presents a conceptual analysis of school desegregation as social justice post-Milliken.Conclusions/RecommendationsThe competing interests of black equality and white freedom central to Milliken remain fundamental to the question of school desegregation 40 years later. In light of growing political and public support for local control, school choice, and neighborhood schools, I conclude by discussing the implications of local control for black students and racial equality within the current context of widening economic equality, political polarization, and racial isolation in the United States and the world.

From “Good Will” to “Anachronism”

This article explores the challenges that have made the pursuit of school integration difficult in the contemporary era. Using court records and newspaper archives, we explore how a New York City school desegregation order came to be seen as “unnecessary,” “unfair,” and “anachronistic,” claims that seem to deny the salience of race in one of the most segregated school systems in the nation. In 1974, Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island became the first New York City school to desegregate under federal district court order. Three decades later, Mark Twain was a highly desirable magnet school under a court-mandated desegregation plan that left students across the city competing fiercely for admissions. In 2007, an immigrant parent from India successfully sued New York City, claiming his daughter was passed over in favor of white students who scored lower on the city's selective school screening test but were admitted in the name of maintaining the 1974 court-mandated racial balance. We argue that Mark Twain's story vividly illustrates not only the importance of demographic change in school desegregation policy but also the evolution of racial discourse and the conceptions of the public good in the post–civil rights era.

Book Review: The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967-2014

The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967-2014 Raymond Wolters Washington Summit Publishers 2015, 612 pagesIn this well-written and carefully referenced book, University of Delaware historian Raymond Wolters takes us on a fascinating historical journey through the increasingly desperate attempts of American education reformers to explain the black-white gap in educational achievement and find ways to close it. In order to do this, he adopts the original approach of presenting detailed biographies of America's main twentieth century educationalists and analyses of their views. These allow us to understand how their viewpoints developed.Wolters tells us at the outset that at the time that USA schools were legally desegregated -following the landmark 1954 case in Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. the Board of Education - the average black student's test scores were 85% of the average student's test scores. Wolters documents all the failed attempts to do something about this, all of them predicated on the 'Doctrine of Zero Group Differences' and thus the assumption that whatever the cause of the achievement gap it must be remediable. The gap has to be a product of environmental factors because the alternative is simply unthinkable. Along the way, we meet a series of interesting, if naive, academics who have tried to solve the problem, wading into a minefield along the way.Much of the background and early crusade is given to us through the biography of the pro-integration educationalist Jonathan Kozol. Wolters explains that the desegregation of schools had meant only that there should be no racial discrimination in selecting the student. This was instituted and, as a consequence, most children attended their local school. However, because neighborhoods tended to be racially segregated, this meant that by the 1960s, schools were overwhelmingly racially homogeneous. And the black-white difference in school achievement remained robust. It was assumed this was because black schools had worse facilities and worse teachers.In 1966, Johns Hopkins University sociologist James Coleman conducted an extensive report into the racial disparity in education. He found that 80% of pupils were in schools that were at least 90% while 65% of black pupils were in schools that were at least 90% black. He also found that the facilities and teacher standards at black and schools were pretty much the same. Finding that the black-white achievement gap had not changed, he needed to find an environmental explanation and after poring over the statistics he found that blacks who attended majority schools scored very slightly higher than other blacks. Accordingly, he argued that being in a more 'middle class' (i.e. white) school stimulated the less able pupils meaning that more integrated schools would close the racial gap. Kozol leapt on this and argued that integrated schools should be introduced and this became government policy. By the late 1960s, courts were reinterpreting the Brown ruling to mean that desegregation meant a racial balance at schools. And so began the bussing of black students to schools. But the achievement gap still did not change.Coleman, who is presented as a kind of 'tragic hero' of environmentalism, then realized his fundamental error. The blacks who had been attending schools in 1965 either lived in largely areas (in the North) or were from relatively prosperous black Southern families. They were not representative of blacks and being at a school probably had nothing to do with their relatively high academic ability. Bussing also had the consequence of white flight, which Coleman documented in 1975 showing that a 5% increase in black pupils caused 10% of pupils to leave. Coleman also conceded that once the black proportion of the school population increased even slightly, 'the characteristics of the lower class room' would quickly take over, meaning it was 'understandable' that parents withdrew their children. …

Calcifying Sorting and Segregating: Brown at 60

The 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Supreme Court 5:4 decision suggests that the Court is divided in its interpretation of Brown and its intent in addressing racial segregation. Although Brown intended equal educational opportunities through desegregation practices, local attempts to achieve racial balance created microclimates for continued minoritization. The Parents Involved decision seems to have impacted Seattle's implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), suggesting seepage between limits on Brown and increasing disproportionality. Additionally, local school and housing policies collude with cultural practice to maintain a social and political order that continues to disadvantage students who belong to minoritized groups segmented by race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and language, often cloaked as a response to disability.

Mississippi Dreamin’ and the American Nightmare

Mississippi Dreamin’ and the American Nightmare Gary J. Kornblith (bio) Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. x + 526 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth and e-book). Joshua D. Rothman. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xx + 391 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95 (cloth and e-book); $24.95 (paper, to be released in May). Over the course of a gory fortnight in the summer of 1835, white citizens of Madison County, Mississippi—fearing that their way of life if not their very lives were at stake—executed roughly two dozen persons for the crime of plotting a massive slave insurrection. A majority of those killed were enslaved black men, but the victims also included seven white men. Most were hanged on orders of a self-styled Committee of Safety established by popular vote in Livingston, the county seat. In lieu of regular court proceedings, Committee members identified and interrogated suspects, tortured them to obtain confessions, and then pronounced them guilty of a capital felony. The magnitude and immediacy of the threat justified such extralegal measures—or so the respectable citizens of Madison County believed. But was there actually a slave rebellion, supported—even instigated—by white allies, in the offing? What caused this deadly social panic and what was its larger historical significance? In the books under review, Joshua D. Rothman and Walter Johnson chronicle these grim events and explicate what they reveal about the social (dis)order of the Mississippi Valley during the Jacksonian era. Although both authors recognize that slaves had excellent reasons to revolt against the status quo in Madison County, each concludes that the insurrection scare of 1835 represented not evidence of the agency of the oppressed but, more likely, the collective delusion of insecure white strivers searching desperately for social esteem and economic success on the cotton frontier. “That a genuine plot existed in 1835 for a gang of white robbers to collaborate with the enslaved in a massive region-wide rebellion . . . is highly improbable,” writes Rothman (p. 265). [End Page 248] Johnson observes vividly that “what happened in the end was less a revolt than a pogrom, a preemptive strike against a conspiracy that may never have existed and left at least sixteen slaves and seven whites dead, their backs scored by torture before their necks were snapped and their legs left quivering at the end of the gallows’ arc” (p. 47). Yet the question of why Madison County exploded in a frenzy of paranoia in the summer of 1835 remains. Rothman devotes most of Flush Times and Fever Dreams to this question and to analyzing another social panic that erupted the same summer in the same region of west-central Mississippi. A major factor was the area’s shifting racial balance, as plantation-based cotton agriculture rapidly took root in the region. In 1830 slaves comprised less than half of Madison County’s total population; in 1840 they accounted for three-quarters. By Rothman’s estimate, at mid-decade, the ratio of blacks to whites in the communities where the frenzy first hit exceeded fifty-to-one. “Making matters even more volatile,” he explains, “as of 1835 settlers in Madison County had failed to establish reliable mechanisms of law and order or even an organized militia system” (p. 99). He faults the rising slaveholding class for this lack of social infrastructure: “It was whites’ own greed that crowded out institutional development and created racial demographics that endangered their own families and threatened the very abundance they believed slave labor made possible” (pp. 99–100). Even taken together, however, greed and demographics fail to explain the decision of the Livingston Committee of Safety to hang whites as well as blacks in the summer of 1835. Expanding upon the research of earlier scholars, Rothman highlights the indirect yet pivotal role played by Virgil Stewart, a maladjusted vagabond and the author (under a pseudonym) of an inflammatory pamphlet titled A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and...

School Resegregation in the Mississippi of the West: Community Counternarratives on the Return to Neighborhood Schools in Las Vegas, 1968–1994

BackgroundSchool desegregation and resegregation in the Mountain West remain understudied despite the substantial impact the region's growth and demographic change have had on racial balance and diversity in schools. Home to the largest school district in the Mountain West and fifth largest school district in the country, Las Vegas's unprecedented rise in students identified as Latino, Asian, and immigrant English-language learners living in poverty, coupled with its legacy of racial segregation, reflect trends and conditions critical to national conversations around racial diversity and school resegregation in the post-Civil Rights Era.PurposeThis article describes the events surrounding the Kelly v. Mason (1968) case, which led to Las Vegas's mandatory school desegregation plan and the African American community's request in 1992 to abandon the mandatory busing plan for a return to neighborhood schools. Its secondary aim is to disrupt a tradition of advocacy for school integration absent the voices, experiences, and, in many cases, forewarnings of Black community stakeholders who questioned whether school desegregation via forced busing would actually result in equal education and genuine racial integration.Research Design and MethodsThe present analysis employs a qualitative research design, historical case study methods, and critical race theory's call to context and counter-narratives to tell the story of school desegregation and resegregation in Las Vegas between 1968 and 1994.ConclusionsThe article concludes with implications and future directions for school desegregation research and policy, particularly given the under-examined nature of school resegregation in the Mountain West.

The Discriminating Priority of Integration: Open Housing Activism in St. Louis County, 1968-1977

The open housing movement of the mid-twentieth century paradoxically combated and contributed to discrimination in the housing market. This paradox was most prevalent in the suburbs bordering American cities where the shifting borderlands, observed historian Thomas Sugrue, became battlegrounds for the future of the city.1 As predominantly white suburban areas underwent transition in the 1960s, local white liberalists developed the philosophy of racial to strategically direct black residential mobility. Racial balance promoted the ideal goal of evenly dispersed residential integration throughout metropolitan areas so that white residents would experience the ennobling cultural and social effects of harmony in neighborhoods and schools. From that perspective, integration in a given neighborhood was successful as long as the black population did not exceed 20 percent. Open housing activists who pursued balance in the suburbs perceived the 20 percent mark as a threshold. They theorized that integrated neighborhoods surpassing the 20 percent threshold would inevitably tip towards a predominantly black demographic because white residents, already fearful of the effects of black neighbors on the area's property values, quality of education, safety, and relative stability, were likely to flee to racially homogenous suburbs. Many white open housing activists believed that once neighborhoods tipped, the processes of urban decay and poverty that began to plague large American cities would spill over into the nearby inner suburbs.2Racial balance strategies involved subtle steering. Historians such as Sugrue have pointed out that balance strategies of the 1960s and early 1970s virtually excluded low-income African Americans from the suburbs. Many open housing organizations in the suburbs only lent practical support to a small middle-class black population that had the means to travel to the affluent, predominantly white areas in the outer suburbs.3 The types of low-income housing that many African Americans sought were uncommon in the wealthy outer suburbs. Such low-income housing did exist, however, in the older suburbs bordering the cities. Fearing tipping and resegregation, some white open housing organizations actively prevented African Americans from settling in racially transitional neighborhoods in the inner suburbs. An open housing organization called Neighbors, which was located in University City, an inner suburb that borders St. Louis City, illustrates the racially discriminating nature of balance in suburban areas and reveals the strategic fissures between black urban and white suburban activism.Kay Drey, a white housing activist from University City who founded New Neighbors in 1969, utilized local and manipulative tactics to achieve the goals of balance. Her successor Harry Bemdt, a white housing activist who did not have local connections with University City, finally brought the organization into line with the broader policies of St. Louis City's open housing groups, such as Freedom of Residence and the Urban League's Operation Equality. He helped black families of all classes find homes anywhere they wished in the metropolitan area. Until Bemdt revised Drey's balance strategies in the mid-1970s, New Neighbors (also known as Open Housing) emphasized a localized version of white liberalist activism to achieve evenly dispersed integration throughout St. Louis County so that no single community would have a black population of more than 20 percent. New Neighbors in St. Louis County and other open housing organizations in America's suburbs genuinely sought harmony. Even some of the most sincere suburban proponents of open housing for African Americans, however, used steering techniques to achieve balance. This finding does not necessarily indict Kay Drey or Neighbors, whose remarkable efforts for equality and justice accomplished much good; rather, it demonstrates the context in which open housing activists such as Drey were forced to operate. …

A city within a city: the black freedom struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Abbreviations Preface 'Rowing, Not Drifting': Black Organizational Reform before World War II Citizens Action: Managerial Racism & Reform Politics The Suburban Oasis: The Origins of Segregated Space The Mustache Saga: The Rise of Black Youth Protest A Black Child's Burden: Busing to Achieve Racial Balance Where Do We Go From Here: Setting the Course for Racial Reconciliation Conclusion: Secondary Cities & The Black Urban Experience