Even though the St. Louis Board of Education established the first high school for blacks west of the Mississippi River, the first facility was substandard. As the black population of St. Louis grew and encroached upon the white residential areas, it became necessary to provide additional school facilities for black enrollment. On several occasions, school officials reluctantly resorted to the conversion of school buildings from white to black use. During the decades of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the St. Louis Public Schools district experienced a tremendous increase in the black student population. School conversions were prompted by civil protests and demands by the black community. The conversion (from white to black) of a school building's use, in some instances, tended to elicit the ire of the affected white parents.
During and after World War II, large numbers of African Americans from the former Confederate States migrated to St. Louis, Missouri. The pace of this migration placed a strain on the St. Louis Public Schools district. The district responded to the facilities shortage by constructing small branch school buildings in its compliance with de jure segregation laws in Missouri before 1954, and after 1954, in its efforts to covertly maintain a pseudo-integrated public school district’s neighborhood school policy.
Public school desegregation in the United States has come to be characterized and defined by the busing of schoolchildren, which is an activity that has been widely resisted and opposed by the white populace. In the St. Louis Public Schools district, the St. Louis Board of Education and its school administrators utilized its “intact busing” program not to achieve public school desegregation but to perpetuate de facto segregation in the classrooms of its elementary schools.
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