Giving Compass' Take:

• Sarah Carr reviews Walter C. Stern's Race & Education in New Orleans, which explores how New Orleans leaders built a segregated city and what it means for modern cities.

• How can cities be intentional about integration moving forward? What policies in your area are preventing integration? 

• Learn more about racial segregation in American cities. 

Just over 100 years ago, the first public high school for black students opened in New Orleans. The debut of McDonogh 35 was a grossly overdue advance for the city’s black population. But the choice of location was hardly accidental. In picking the Rampart Street corridor for the school’s location, the city’s school board made a strategic decision to semi-officially designate it a “black” area — understanding that might lead over time to the departure of the neighborhood’s white residents, and particularly its many Jewish small business owners — even though blacks comprised just 39 percent of the school’s closest neighbors in 1920. The white majority did indeed flee, and public disinvestment in the area’s stability and upkeep followed.

In his recently published book, Stern delves deeply into the ties between schools and real estate.

“The connection that local power-brokers made between race, schools, and blight was anything but incidental,” Stern writes. “The city’s willingness to destroy black neighborhoods, which were recognized as such because they had a black school, revealed its blatant disregard for black residential stability.”

This was before Brown v. Board of Education made school desegregation the law — if not the practice — of the land. Jim Crow allowed, and encouraged, the segregation of public facilities on the basis of race. White leaders aggressively responded, reordering the urban landscape; not only did they place a black school like McDonogh 35 in a diverse neighborhood, causing the area to empty of whites, but they also placed black schools in areas that were physically unsuitable for almost any purpose. For example, white leaders selected a remote, virtually uninhabitable corner of the city known as Desire for the Carver Complex, which combined a black school and public housing. The soil quality in the area was so poor that school buildings required unprecedented seventy-foot pilings. The “Carver complex became an anchor for a new black homeland that was out of sight and mind for most city dwellers,” Stern writes.

The city’s willingness to destroy black neighborhoods, which were recognized as such because they had a black school, revealed its blatant disregard for black residential stability.

Throughout the book, Stern shows how this proactive and calculated approach to segregation served as a model to South African leaders, who were also hoping to keep the races separate — and whites in charge. “The American conception of race as a means for herding society traveled further still as officials in South Africa looked to the South for guidance on creating and maintaining segregation,” he says. Stern likens the Carver complex to “an educational Soweto,” a reference to the isolation of South African blacks in the Soweto townships adjacent to Johannesburg. Plans for the complex “reflected the magical thinking — prominent among both white Americans and South Africans — that segregation would last forever,” he writes. “It also provided a framework for turning those dreams into reality.”

Read the full article about Race & Education in New Orleans by Sarah Carr at The Hechinger Report.