When we buried Margaret Bush Wilson on Tuesday at the age of 90, let us not have buried any of her intelligence, courage, passion for justice or fighting spirit. The struggles to which she dedicated her impressive, productive and unprecedented life are far from concluded, even with a black man in the White House and diversity an increasingly recognized and prized value in this city she fought to integrate.
Only the second woman of color licensed to practice law in Missouri, Margaret Bush Wilson argued the landmark 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it finally outlawed the restrictive covenants used to prevent blacks from buying homes in certain sections of St. Louis.
However, the degree of residential and social segregation in St. Louis remains striking to many who visit or relocate here. Mayor Francis G. Slay likes to blame the area’s notorious segregation on St. Louis County and the Metro East, while claiming, “We are the 5th most integrated city in the America, block by block, blacks and white living and working together,” but this cherished statistic of his derives from a discredited study.
“The study the mayor is referring to is one released by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers six years ago, ‘Racial Integration in Urban America,’” John Farley, professor emeritus of Sociology at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, told us.
He said the study that told the mayor what he wanted to hear “uses what most researchers regard as a very questionable definition of how integrated a city is – the percentage of the city’s population that live in tracts with populations between 80 percent white/20 percent black and 80 percent black /20 percent white.”
Farley said this definition skews the data in favor of cities like St. Louis with a large black population. “Since the nation’s population is 13 percent African-American and about 70 percent white, this ‘integration index’ will by definition come out to be higher in places, like St. Louis, that have African-American percentages above the national average,” Farley said. “Hence, a big part of what it is measuring is the racial composition of the city, not how integrated that population is.”
So though, thanks to Wilson, it is no longer legal to exclude a black family from buying a home in a given St. Louis neighborhood, we have not yet progressed to the point where large numbers of people from different backgrounds willingly embrace one another as neighbors. This skittishness is one of many reasons why a developer like Paul McKee Jr. who is willing to invest in the majority-black North Side encounters suspicion from the community he proposes to improve. The inherited assumption in St. Louis is, if middle-class white people are moving back in, then there must be a plan afoot to move the black people out.
Margaret Bush Wilson did what she could to leave her community a better legacy than that, yet she leaves a tremendous amount of her work behind for us to carry on in her name. The crowd that came to the funeral services for this pioneering lawyer, leader and civil rights activist at All Saints Episcopal Church was a diverse one – black and white, rich and poor, young and old. If we can mourn together, then surely we can live and work together in this city where she was born and, sadly, has died.