"Unequal Spaces: Segregation and School Modernization in Raleigh, North Carolina 1920-1964"

Between 1920 and 1964, the city of Raleigh was radically transformed, growing from a small, relatively dense capital city with a number of racially diverse communities to large sprawling civic, commercial, and educational hub with neighborhoods increasingly divided along race lines. At the forefront of this transformation was a series of school building campaigns aimed at modernizing educational facilities throughout the city. Beginning in the 1920’s the Raleigh school board, under the advisement of the city’s chamber of commerce, used school planning as a method of advancing segregated neighborhoods. Beginning in the Post-World War II period, faculty at the newly formed School of Design at North Carolina State University were instrumental establishment of new school design standards based on contemporary modernist trends with the support of the nominally progressive leadership of the city. These new schools, as with all public schools in the state of North Carolina, were racially segregated, but with the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the status of race in educational facilities was brought to the forefront. This research explores the development of racially defined communities in Raleigh by examining the discriminatory methods of school planning and design in order to illustrate that the planning of schools from the 1920’s through the mid century was used as a method of increasing segregation at the scale of the city, and furthermore to demonstrate that the perception and implementation of a modernist aesthetic was not uniform. It will be argued that these modern schools were aimed creating an image of progressive values while simultaneously reasserting the values of the segregationist South.