The State Historical Society of Missouri is awarding a Center for Missouri Studies fellowship to a pair of scholars from the Saint Louis University (SLU) School of Education in 2025. Amy Shelton, an adjunct professor and senior researcher at the SLU Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) Center, and Joseph R. Nichols Jr., an associate professor and affiliate research faculty with PRiME, will share the fellowship for their joint research project, “School District Boundaries and the Preservation of Segregation in Suburban St. Louis.”
Shelton and Nichols will examine how redrawing school district boundaries in St. Louis County in the years following World War II contributed to ongoing segregation during a time of racial transition. From 1948 to 1970, when the St. Louis area’s population was moving from the central city to the suburbs, the number of school districts in St. Louis County decreased from 84 to 25. While school officials attributed the consolidations to financial concerns, the redrawn school district lines generally reinforced existing racial divides and unequal distribution of financial resources among the county’s municipalities.
“We are grateful to the State Historical Society of Missouri for their support of this important project,” Shelton said. “Today, St. Louis County is fragmented into 23 geographic school districts ranging in size from 700 students to almost 20,000 students. Six districts are more than 75 percent Black, and four are more than 75 percent White. Our work examines the missed opportunity to racially integrate schools in the region through district consolidations in the postwar period and points to the ways in which district officials played an active role in shaping segregation in suburban St. Louis. This has implications for how we think about school and neighborhood segregation and its remedies today.”
“History tells the story of who we are and how we got to where we are today,” Nichols said. “As members of the St. Louis region who care deeply about equity in education, our exploration of the history of racial segregation and schooling in postwar St. Louis will help us better understand the contemporary educational context of this place we call home as well as enrich our understanding of the history of Missouri.”
The fellowship includes a $5,000 stipend. Recipients are offered an opportunity to write an article for publication in the Missouri Historical Review, a scholarly journal published by the State Historical Society. Center for Missouri Studies fellows are also invited to make a public presentation of their work. Shelton and Nichols will hold their appointments for the 2025 calendar year.