| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines the history and development of a suburban school district, as its surrounding community transformed from a quiet village to a white, blue-collar suburb, then to an urban space with predominantly non-white residents and students. The study's five chapters present an analysis of fifty years (1950-2000) of the history of Hickman Mills, a small community on the south side of Kansas City, Missouri. The history of the school district and the neighborhoods it served reveals the flawed distinctions often made between rural, suburban, and urban spaces. In particular, this study questions the common definitions assigned to urban and suburban communities, as well as schools. In analyzing this suburban space, my methodology includes documentary analysis, personal interviews to collect oral histories, quantitative data collection from the U.S. Census, as well as spatial analysis in the form of census tract maps within the school district. I employ geographic and sociological theories of urbanization and racial change to examine the transformation of Missouri's first consolidated school district from suburban to urban, white to black. Chapter one primarily explores the postwar period for Kansas City and Hickman Mills, with rapid population growth within district borders as white families moved to the area and sent their children to school. Chapter two provides an analysis of two early crises within the school district, both occurring between 1957 and 1960, with an explanation of how the events in these three years helped shift district and community identity. Chapter three further addresses questions of community identity during the 1960s when Kansas City, Missouri annexed the district neighborhoods, as well as reticence on the part of Hickmanites to support their schools through increased tax levies. Chapter four demonstrates another change in community identity during the 1970s and 1980s as residents largely banded together to fight what they saw as threats to the community, chief among them low-income housing, school consolidation with Kansas City, Missouri, and the entrance of large numbers of African-American families. Chapter five focuses on Hickman Mills in the 1990s, as local white perception of the community and the schools deteriorated when larger numbers of black families moved to the area. At the same time that this study adds to a burgeoning scholarship on race in suburban communities and school districts, it also complicates traditional stories of white flight and urbanization. The history of Hickman Mills's transformation from a "suburban" community to an "urban" one, as well as the perception of the school district changing from "good" to "bad," broadens our understanding of the history of race and schooling as well as the effects of desegregation upon communities. I argue that the change Hickman Mills underwent was largely a result of how its neighborhoods were perceived as racial spaces, first as white and "normal," then as black and "unsafe." Ultimately, this study exemplifies how the social construction of space plays a significant role in neighborhoods and schools. | |
