The Delmar Divide

“The Delmar Divide” is a term popularized by a short 2014 documentary by the BBC covering the sharp racial and economic disparity between the areas to the north and to the south of Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. Municipal statistics report that the neighborhoods north of Delmar are ninety-eight percent black, while those to the south of are seventy percent white, and the proportions of residents with a college degree vary similarly. This issue is of particular interest to me, as I grew up two blocks south of the “divide,” in a community that was majority black but an immediate neighborhood that was almost exclusively white. What I wasn’t directly aware of growing up, however, was the history that created this division. It began with a St. Louis city ordinance under Jim Crow in 1916 that mandated that if an area was comprised at least seventy-five percent by one race, no one of another race could move to the neighborhood. Despite this nod toward the “separate but equal” test, of course the law was discriminatorily applied, besides the fact of the low number of white St. Louisiana attempting to move into majority black neighborhoods. When this ordinance was overturned by the Supreme Court in response to a challenge by the NAACP, housing covenants were enacted in its place. These explicitly restricted “non-Caucasian peoples” from purchasing houses in specific neighborhoods, and were in turn ruled unconstitutional in 1948. By that time, however, much of the damage and had been done, and housing segregation was reinforced in following decades, if through less explicit avenues. While I had always treated this racial division roughly dividing my neighborhood as something of an unhappy coincidence, not many people are aware of the way that it was explicitly engineered by people resorting to increasingly devious measures to maintain segregation and its underpinning of white supremacy—in the various measures used by St. Louis city to reinforce segregation are a testament to the nation’s “dedication to white supremacy.” In fact it is literally the opposite of an unhappy coincidence, but is in fact exactly the way the system is supposed to operate; this example can help us remember the essential fact that much of the very structure of America was erected for the explicit purpose of enshrining white supremacy, and that is only our “epistemology of ignorance” that, once overt racism and segregation became widely considered a moral ill, erased that motivation from the national narrative—but not its effects.