Racial Issues in Saint Louis, Missouri
Michelle Strohm
ETH/125
July 4, 2010
Cindy Kacmar

When I started thinking about how the influences of race relating to my community I first thought about the local schools. My daughter attends a local public school, which has some diversity in race. What first came to mind though was the huge desegregation program they have had in existence for many years. Almost any morning or afternoon you will see a sea of yellow on the freeways. Some 14,000 African-American children are bused out of the city and into the suburban St. Louis County every school day. More than 1600 white suburban students go in the other direction to the city’s “magnet” schools. Magnet schools are public schools with specialized courses. “Magnet” refers to how the schools draw students from across the normal boundaries defined by school zones that feed into certain schools. Within the city, 3500 children shuffle between black north St. Louis and the mainly white south side. Our program is the largest desegregation program in the country. The next example I thought of about race relating to my community was my local highways. Many years ago my community adopted a program called “Adopt A Highway”. It involves the community to keep areas of their assigned highway clean. I can remember in 8th grade cleaning up along a main road in my town that my school adopted just for the 8th graders. One day after I started driving, I was going down highway 55, and noticed they had dedicated a section of highway 55 to Rosa Parks. She is an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement, and made a change in history. Well the Ku Klux Klan decided to adopt an area to clean and can you guess where they put them, on the section of highway that had been dedicated to Rosa Parks. I think that was a bitter sweet decision, and a very funny one at that.