6: The Road to Full Disengagement From Compliance, 1960s

The growing awareness of regional specificity in Black Freedom studies has prompted us to write this narrative of the SLPS district (Joseph, 2000; Theoharis, 2006). Since the start of public education in Missouri, the anti-Black political and social governance has taken great pains to ensure that the public schools of the state were racially isolated. The disconnect between the Board’s publicly stated/approved three-stage managed integration plan and the SLPS district’s segregative actions since 1954 continued well into the 1960s. The Board blamed the essence of the disconnect/barrier to integrated schools in the SLPS district on political and cultural factors as similarly determined by Davison M. Douglas, current dean of the oldest law school in America—William and Mary University. Douglas, in his celebrated career as a lawyer and scholar, has shared the structural constraints Blacks faced outside of the former confederate states when he examined how communities in the North, devoid of de jure segregation, engaged in school segregation as Black educational activists challenged the illegal activity (Douglas, 2005). Delmont has related how busing of schoolchildren nationally as a desegregation remedy turned White liberal allies against the Black struggle for equitable educational opportunities (Delmont, 2016).