Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 by David Lucander

Author:David Lucander [Lucander, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, American, United States, Social Science, Civil Rights, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, 20th Century, History, General
ISBN: 9780252096556
Google: A21zAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53435362
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ripples of Reform: School and Stadium Desegregation in St. Louis

Social and political movements sometimes effect change in places that were not directly targeted as a site of struggle. The agitation spawned by St. Louis MOWM caused a ripple throughout the city, and discriminatory barriers broke down in locations that MOWM never directly challenged. Protesting at defense plants, restaurant sit-ins, and pickets at the phone company created a climate of reform that swept through other institutions, and during the Second World War parochial schools and a baseball stadium in St. Louis quietly desegregated on their own.63 Although MOWM never targeted these sites directly, its protests at a defense factory near Sportsman's Park and its challenges to Lincoln University undoubtedly made the organization known to stadium management and university administration. St. Louis MOWM's actions against segregated and inequitable higher education answered A. Philip Randolph's 1943 advice to expose “the myth of equal but separate” permeating American educational institutions at all levels. Evidence of racism and inequality was everywhere, said Randolph, from the textbooks used in early childhood that “paint the Negro as a happy slave, a buffoon, or a corrupt citizen” to the underdevelopment of educational and professional opportunities available to African American students, faculty, and administrators.64

In 1944 St. Louis University announced plans to admit African American students during the upcoming summer session. The decision was momentous because St. Louis University was a traditionally Catholic institution in a city where more than half of the residents shared the faith. As was the pattern in many pathbreaking “firsts,” the university took a gradualist approach. It started by integrating the graduate school, and then it slowly began desegregating the general body of undergraduate students. All of the first three African American pioneers who matriculated into the graduate school were women, and each of them had a history of work as public school teachers. Shortly thereafter, two African American males enrolled as undergraduates, followed by eight more women entering the School of Social Work.65 St. Louis University's voluntary but limited removal of racial barriers made it the first university in a former slave state to integrate its student body, and it led the way for all of the city's parochial schools to be desegregated years before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.66

The small steps toward progress that were made in the formerly all-white university owed something to St. Louis MOWM's push for reforms at Lincoln University. This university, dubbed by one historian as “the crown jewel of the state's segregated schools,” was beset with the usual problems of higher education in the Jim Crow South.67 Under the subterfuge of separate but equal, its facilities were inadequate, full-time faculty had incredibly high teaching loads, course offerings were curtailed, its record of meaningful research was scant, and it had difficulty retaining faculty.68 Other than its respected program for training educators, one observer complained, “Education on a college level…is virtually impossible.” Not surprisingly, opportunities for African Americans to pursue postbaccalaureate schooling in Missouri were extremely limited,

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