Desegregating the Valley of the Sun: Phillips v. Phoenix Union High Schools
POPULAR opinion has always held that Phoenix, Arizona, has offered newcomers opportunities to enjoy freedom from the racial tensions and antagonisms of more densely populated cities. Celebrated Western poetry, novels, and films bear witness to this fact. Generally, however, Phoenix’s race relations have mirrored those in most American cities: segregated and unequal by custom and by law. Historically, people who migrated to Phoenix, particularly white and black Americans, brought with them cultural attitudes about race that they attempted to adapt and negotiate after establishing themselves in the city. They modified their concepts of race and ethnicity only insofar as these concepts would continue to validate their preconceived notions. Like the majority of whites in American cities, Phoenix’s founders and ruling white elite supported systematic cam-paigns to create a flourishing community “run by Anglos, for Anglos.” Many of the city’s founders, in fact, were white, had Southern roots, and harbored the same anti-black, anti-Indian, anti-Latino, and anti-Jewish attitudes that dominated race relations in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South. Phoenix was incorporated in 1870. Surrounded by a series of upper Sonoran Desert mountain ranges, such as South Mountain, Camelback Mountain, and the Estella, Supersti- tion, and San Tan Mountains, “The Valley,” as it has come to be called, soon became a Western outpost of white supremacy and racial inequality. The white male founders of Phoenix quickly imported mecha- nisms from states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, which formed the gestalt of a racial caste system, defining race relations and socioeconomic mobility in Phoenix through-out the twentieth century.