Residential segregation is powerful in the United States and can include looking to secede from a city to form a new largely white community:

The parents’ first petition drive to create a city, which ended in 2015, looked as if it would be successful. Supporters of St. George, arguing that the schools in East Baton Rouge Parish were not doing enough for their children, had amassed more than 18,000 signatures, and submitted them to the registrar to be certified. But the same day as they submitted their petition, a group known as Better Together submitted its own forms to the registrar. “We did a withdrawal campaign,” M. E. Cormier, a spokeswoman for the Better Together campaign, told me. “We went door-to-door, told people about the detrimental effects of the creation of St. George, and we were able to get 1,000 people to withdraw their names from the petition.”…

In between the failed 2015 attempt and the new one, they tried to iron out a new strategy. They cut down the geographic area of their proposed City of St. George. The original map was roughly 85 square miles; the new area was 60. It would be easier to gain the signatures necessary for a new community with a smaller area. As soon as the proposed map was released, several people in favor of keeping East Baton Rouge Parish together noted that the new map, coincidentally, carved out several apartment complexes—places where black and low-income families lived.

St. George supporters vehemently denied the suggestion that the map was drawn with any malicious racial intent. “The decision on what areas to include and not include was based exclusively on the amount of previous support for the effort,” they wrote in a post on their official Facebook page. “If a precinct had a small percentage of signatures and clearly did not want to be in the new city, they were not included in the updated boundaries.” But practically, that meant that the proposed area of St. George became whiter and more affluent.

The organizers did something else significant as well, Michael Beychok, a political consultant who lives in what would become the new city, told me: They stopped talking so much about the schools. “They know, and we know, that the school argument is not their best argument to incorporate,” said Beychok, who is one of the organizers of One Baton Rouge, a group opposed to the creation of St. George.