In her important new essay, White Cities, White Schools, Professor Erika Wilson discusses the intersection of property law and education as part of an excellent symposium uniting the two topics, organized by Professors LaToya Baldwin Clark and Tim Mulvaney in the Columbia Law Review.
Wilson’s piece builds on recent law and geography scholarship by focusing on race, exclusion, and school district boundaries—topics that are familiar to those of us who teach land use and local government law but underdiscussed in the literature.
Much of her analysis centers on what she calls “white island districts,” which she defines as “predominantly white and affluent school districts that are situated in the middle of racially and economically diverse metropolitan areas.” (P. 1240.) Wilson’s essay seeks to challenge the dominant narrative, which sees these school districts as a product of individual decisions about where to live, rather than as a product of intentional racial discrimination.
In the essay, Wilson asserts that, just as formerly whites-only municipalities are “places” imbued with racial violence, history, and meaning, so too are the school district boundary lines that mirror those municipal boundaries. She explains that these boundary lines both serve to exclude those who live outside, and recruit those who are attracted to the schools that are created by these boundaries. These functions combine to “entrench the district . . . enabling it to capitalize on its racially exclusionary origins.”
And yet law and policy treat school district boundaries as mere race-neutral geographic spaces, failing to account for this history in determining whether it should be constitutional or normatively acceptable to maintain district boundaries that match the boundaries of formerly all-white cities.
The essay begins by considering how law and norms helped to create white-only suburbs. She notes that these whites-only cities were associated with higher status, and that in addition to zoning, and federal mortgage policies that encouraged and even required the use of racially restrictive covenants, the whiteness of these areas was often enforced with violence, which was justified as a way to protect property values.
And, as Wilson notes, having a reputation as a whites-only city that was enforced by violence “continues to make Black residents wary of locating to these municipalities long after the use of legal and extralegal means to exclude them has ended.” (P. 1234.) Thus, this historic racial violence is tied to the geographic space, as well as to its present conditions. These spaces are thus understood as racialized places, where this history continues to exclude and alienate Black people, while granting access to and making white people feel welcomed or safe.
The essay then considers the case study of Grosse Point, Michigan, which was a “sundown town” in which nonwhite people could not live or remain after dark. Wilson discusses the points-based systems that realtors used to exclude people from purchasing homes in the area, as well as threats and acts of violence.
She also points out that the state and local government failed to act to stop these behaviors. Even today, wealthy Grosse Point is still predominantly white, due both to this history of racial violence, and due to financial barriers and the racial wealth gap.
Here, Wilson turns to the modern-day Grosse Point Public School District, a “white island district” the boundaries of which encompass local governments that excluded nonwhite people (and which are still over 80% white). Indeed, this school district includes suburbs at issue in Milliken v. Bradley,1 an important case that many of us teach in our State and Local Government classes.
In that case, the Court held that while the city of Detroit had purposefully segregated within its school system, the surrounding suburbs had not engaged in the same type of de jure segregation; thus, the Court would not allow an interdistrict remedy that crossed district lines and affected the suburbs to alleviate the segregation. But, as Wilson points out, 13 of the 53 suburbs involved in that case “had roots as formerly whites-only, sundown municipalities.”
Wilson goes on to explain how even today, the Grosse Point Public School District polices its borders to keep non-residents out of the Grosse Point schools, and how in contrast, the adjacent Detroit public school district is predominantly Black and “suffers from a lack of funding, lack of high-quality and fully certified teachers, and dilapidated facilities.”
Finally, Wilson looks more broadly at the boundaries around school districts, and the reasons and ways that they can be reconfigured. The problem, Wilson points out, is that despite the fact that law and policy cement school district boundary lines, and those boundary lines contain and separate places with racial advantage from those without, our Equal Protection jurisprudence is generally insufficient to address these problems.
Local government literature explains that local control over school district boundaries—and especially parental control—is offered protection under the law. Thus, the laws and policies that protect and reify these school district boundaries effectively protect racial segregation; Equal Protection jurisprudence today views issues of geography and boundaries as results of individual decision-making, rather than state-facilitated race-based exclusion.
Thus, the essay concludes by offering suggestions to change the status quo, including rethinking our Equal Protection jurisprudence, and encouraging states to reconsider their policies pertaining to school district boundary line changes. Wilson’s essay does a great job of bringing together disparate discussions that are happening in property, local government, law and geography, and education law, and is a must-read for anyone interested in these fields as they pertain to racial discrimination.
- Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).
