MAKING PHILADELPHIA THE CAPITAL OF INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION
Set against the backdrop of persistent employment and housing discrimination, schools were not a top-tier issue for most of Philadelphia’s civil rights advocates in the 1950s. Breaking racial barriers in the labor and housing markets required considerable resources, and despite making slow and fitful progress on these fronts, the outlook for addressing school discrimination was even less promising. The challenge of fighting discrimination in the schools stemmed largely from the institutional inertia of the city’s school board. Many historians have argued that Progressive Era campaigns to “take the schools out of politics” were veiled attempts by elites to take control of school boards away from the ethnic and working-class communities that controlled urban boards in the early twentieth century.7 While Philadelphia was part of this larger trend, its school board was even more removed from community groups and voters than in other major cities. Unlike cities in which school board members were selected by mayors or chosen in elections, Philadelphia’s fifteen-member board of education was selected by a panel of judges, and members could be reappointed for six-year terms as long as they chose to serve. In New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and San Francisco, mayors appointed school board members, while in Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Boston members were selected in nonpartisan elections. Only in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, among other major cities, were school boards appointed by a panel of judges as they were in Philadelphia.8
In practice, the panel of judges appointed candidates selected by the city’s political parties, alternating between Democratic and Republic appointees. Although members were nominally independent from political influence, a 1967 study by City University of New York researchers contended that the school board was “conservative and closely aligned with the city’s political leadership” and included “members of the Philadelphia business community who were less concerned with educational policy than they were with avoiding controversy and limiting school expenditures to acceptable levels.”9 School district business manager Add Anderson supervised these expenditures and pleased both political parties by keeping school tax increases as low as possible. Anderson controlled more than two hundred patronage jobs and wielded enormous influence until his death in 1962.10 The school board setup also insulated the district from investigations by the Commission on Human Relations (CHR), the city’s discrimination watchdog group, and isolated the schools from public opinion during Philadelphia’s era of civic reform in the early 1950s.11 “The board is a removed aristocracy, twice removed from popular control,” CHR chairmen George Schermer told a reviewer from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1962. “Its members sit on Olympus, insulated by a board of judges, and insensitive to the popular demands of the school public.”12 A civic groups’ description also conveyed the school board’s secrecy and insularity:
The afternoon meetings of the Board of Public Education in Philadelphia are formal and brief, and attendance by the public is limited. Decisions are reached in executive session; discussions of programs rarely take place in public view although wide differences of opinion exist among board members on some issues. The printed minutes of the Board’s meetings contain routine administrative details. In one recent instance where controversy erupted in a public meeting of the board, all reference to the dispute was further expunged.13
All of this made the work of civil rights advocates who prioritized the issue of discrimination in schools, like Fagan and Logan, more urgent and difficult.
Confronted with a school board isolated from the daily experiences of the city’s students and parents, Fagan worked to strengthen the Fellowship Commission’s relationship with the schools in order to implement intercultural educational materials and programs into the curriculum. The Fellowship Commission’s relationship with the school system dated back to the Commission’s founding in 1941. The first chairman of the Fellowship Commission, William Welsh, was also an assistant superintendent of schools, and Fellowship Commission vice chairmen Tanner Duckrey served as an assistant to the Department of Superintendents, the first African American to serve in this capacity.14 The Commission started its first school project in September 1944. In this Early Childhood Project, the Fellowship Commission worked with the public schools and consultants from the Bureau for Intercultural Education, a national organization of progressive educators led by William Kilpatrick of Columbia University. The Fellowship Commission and the Bureau for Intercultural Education sought to find a scientific basis for showing that children’s attitudes could change, and that teachers who were not experts in intercultural educational methods could help bring about this change.15 The results of this research were published in 1952 in They Learn What They Live, the eighth in a series of ten books produced by the Bureau on Intercultural Education from 1943 to 1954 in its Problems of Race and Culture in American Education series.16
The Early Childhood Project received attention in education journals, as well as in Philadelphia newspapers and national newspapers and magazines. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin praised the research for offering “concrete, scientific proof that brotherly love isn’t a nebulous out-dated ideal, not even in these tense times.”17 The New York Times called the project “pioneer research” that revealed that young children bring to school “definite feelings about race, awareness of religious differences and of the significance of ‘we’re rich’ or ‘they’re poor.’” 18 More important, the Early Childhood Project helped to establish Philadelphia as a leading national site for intercultural education, and it helped the Fellowship Commission solidify its friendly working relationship with the school system. By 1947, George Trowbridge, chairman of the Fellowship Commission, told those gathered at the annual meeting that “Undoubtedly the most encouraging evidence of successful results in 1946 is to be found in our relationships with the Philadelphia School System.”19 Between the completion of the project in 1948 and the publication of the final report in 1952, the Fellowship Commission continued to strengthen this relationship by organizing intercultural leadership seminars for teachers, principals, and parents and by developing new intercultural education materials as curriculum supplements.
Building on the positive reception to the Early Childhood Project from educational scholars across the country, Fagan believed that this national community of social scientists could be the key to addressing discrimination in Philadelphia’s schools. To this end, Fagan dedicated a majority of his time between 1952 and 1954 to developing an ambitious Ford Foundation proposal he believed would further establish Philadelphia as a leader in antidiscrimination education. The proposal called for a thirteen-year plan in which the Fellowship Commission would work with a group of leading social scientists to use Philadelphia as a “laboratory on intergroup relations.” The Fellowship Commission proposed to establish eight field offices to study community relations in segregated and integrated neighborhoods. In the central component of this study, human relations experts would follow young people in different neighborhoods from kindergarten through high school. They hoped to examine the development of intergroup attitudes, including whether and how intergroup contact in neighborhoods affected the intercultural education being offered in the schools. Fagan and his colleagues also hoped to use the grant to experiment with new uses of television, building on their teenage television program They Shall Be Heard, to “personalize” intercultural education messages.20 Although the Ford Foundation rejected the six-and-a-half-million-dollar proposal, the request clearly outlines the Fellowship Commission’s thinking on intercultural relations in this period.21 In its focus on ascertaining and changing prejudiced attitudes, the Fellowship Commission’s approach to this study mirrored the work of academics who, in the wake of Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), published widely on prejudice and social relations, including publications that influenced the Brown decision.
Myrdal’s thirteen-hundred-page book argued that racism contradicted America’s democratic
ideals and that the racial dogma that supported racial oppression could be uprooted through education. The Carnegie Corporation, the project’s sponsor, had previously paid little attention to domestic race issues, focusing instead on financing educational projects in British colonies in Africa.22 Carnegie trustees proposed a study of the “Negro problem” in 1935 largely out of concern for rising racial tensions.23 They picked Myrdal, a Swedish economist with little familiarity with American race relations, to bring an “entirely fresh mind” to the subject. For Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, this meant breaking with both the “old regime of the South” and the “traditions of the abolitionist movement.”24 Following this directive, Myrdal presented facts about racial violence and oppression in a way that would be palatable for the broadest possible audience. “Myrdal’s genius,” sociologist Stephen Steinberg argues, “was to dispense only as much medicine as the patient was willing to swallow.”25 Myrdal’s book was politically safe because he emphasized moral persuasion rather than specific policies or legislation to challenge racial structures. While Myrdal’s anti-prejudice framework helped to delegitimize racism, An American Dilemma also obscured frameworks for understanding racism as a result of structural power inequalities.
In contrast, African American historian Rayford Logan (no relation to Floyd Logan) edited What the Negro Wants, a collection of fourteen essays including contributions from W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Langston Hughes. Published the same year as An American Dilemma, the essays in What the Negro Wants focus on the need for African Americans to push for full economic, political, legal, and social equality. These opinions were initially deemed too controversial to print by the editor who commissioned the study. After Logan threatened to take the manuscript to another press and consult an attorney, the editor agreed to publish the book, provided that it contained an introduction disassociating himself from the essays. “What disturbed Mr. Couch [the editor] more than anything else,” Logan later wrote, “was the virtual unanimity of the 14 contributors in wanting equal rights for Negroes.”26 Logan’s contribution to the collection, “The Negro Wants First-Class Citizenship,” clearly outlined six fundamental civil rights demands: “Equality of opportunity; Equal pay for equal work; Equal protection of the laws; Equality of suffrage; Equal recognition of the dignity of the human being; and Abolition of public segregation.”27 Unlike Myrdal, Logan and his fellow essayists framed racism in terms of power and the unequal allocation of resources and life chances. They welcomed education and moral persuasion as tools to fight prejudice, but recognized that these tools alone were insufficient in fighting structural racism. What the Negro Wants influenced postwar civil rights activists, but it lacked both the Carnegie Corporation’s prestigious imprint and the politically safe message that helped to elevate An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s anti-prejudice framework became the dominant model for understanding racial problems in this era, and his book shaped the way many political leaders, courts, journalists, and local organizations like the Fellowship Commission talked about racism.28
Working in the shadow of Myrdal, Fagan hoped to use social science methods to move beyond “trial and error” approaches to antidiscrimination work by establishing a “sound and scientific basis” for a new “science of intergroup relations.”29 Not coincidentally, several professors of psychology and sociology reviewed drafts of the Fellowship Commission’s Ford Foundation proposal and submitted letters of support for the project, including Otto Klineberg and R. M. MacIver of Columbia, Ira Reid of Haverford College, and Gordon Allport of Harvard University, who called the proposal “brilliant and audacious.”30 In submitting this proposal, the Fellowship Commission believed that Philadelphia could provide a model for other cities to follow in dealing with rapidly changing neighborhoods and schools.
Yet while the Fellowship Commission was drawing up plans to use Philadelphia as a national laboratory for community relations, the city’s schools grew more segregated. The tension between the Fellowship Commission’s ambitions and the city’s changing educational situation came out in the group’s first meeting to discuss the Ford proposal. Florence Kite, a Society of Friends representative on the Fellowship Commission, questioned Fagan about the intercultural school programs he hoped to make citywide. “What is the point of working on an intercultural human relations program in the high schools … when some of our local Philadelphia high schools are segregated?” Kite asked. Kite further questioned Fagan about the utility of intercultural programs “when there is no opportunity for the students to meet other students who are not of their own group, within a given high school.” Fagan replied:
Both programs are important, the one of breaking down the pattern of segregated schools where they exists [sic], and, at the same time, affording opportunities in the interim for students from such a homogenous school to mix with students from other groups in such organizations as High School Fellowship, for example. We must find some way of doing both at the same time—for we dare not abandon either approach.31
Fagan argued for this dual approach in 1952, but through the mid-and late 1950s the Fellowship Commission dedicated more resources to, and had more success with, its intercultural education programs. Fagan and the Fellowship Commission illustrate, at a local level, the limitations of focusing strictly on education to eliminate prejudice. The Fellowship Commission’s strategic decision to focus on prejudiced attitudes rather than the school board’s zoning or building policies meant that the burden of fighting de facto desegregation in the city’s schools fell almost entirely to Floyd Logan.
FIGHTING DISCRIMINATION AT THE NEIGHBORHOOD LEVEL
While Fagan and the Fellowship Commission worked to make Philadelphia a locus of activity for intercultural educators, Floyd Logan was almost two decades into his work on behalf of black teachers and students. Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Logan attended segregated schools from elementary school through high school. Logan moved to Philadelphia in 1921, where he worked with the U.S. Customs Bureau and later the Internal Revenue Service. In 1932, Logan and fifteen other black Philadelphians founded the Educational Equality League (EEL) with the goals of obtaining and safeguarding “equal education opportunities for all people regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin” and bringing “about interracial integration of pupils, teachers, and other personnel.”32 Logan worked on the issue of employment discrimination against teachers through the late 1930s and the 1940s, and although progress was slow, he helped to secure the merger of racially segregated teacher eligibility lists and helped a small number of black teachers make inroads into junior and senior high schools.33 During this time, Logan was the EEL’s president, spokesman, and chief researcher, and he dedicated himself full-time to this unpaid work when he retired with a government pension in 1955.
Working from his home in West Philadelphia, Logan wrote thousands of letters requesting statistical information from the school board, notifying school and city officials of discrimination encountered by black students and teachers, and reminding officials of promises and policies they had failed to implement.34 Logan worked occasionally with the Fellowship Commission, the NAACP, the Urban League, and other civil rights advocates, but he was the only one who dedicated himself fulltime to educational issues. Logan’s work on behalf of black students in these years reveals the inequities of a public school system that, as a result of discriminatory housing practices, the school board’s school construction decisions, and the school board’s unwillingness to implement affirmative policies for integration, grew more segregated throughout the decade.
Logan first turned his attention to the segregation of students in public schools in November 1947 when he called the first of two conferences with leaders of local civil rights organizations, including the Philadelphia NAACP, the Philadelphia Council of Churches, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The members met with school officials to express their “deep concern over the alarming growth of predomi
nant[ly] colored schools in Philadelphia.” They also discussed possible legal suits “testing the legality of the practice of segregation on the basis of race in our public schools,” but they did not make any progress on this front in the subsequent three years.35 In early 1951, however, Logan seized on a visiting committee’s report on the majority-black Benjamin Franklin High School to lobby for the replacement of its outdated facilities and limited curriculum. In taking up this high school case, Logan addressed the educational level in which black students encountered the widest spectrum of educational discrimination.
Between 1900 and 1950, high school enrollments increased dramatically. Nationally, the percentage of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds in high school grew from 10 percent in 1900 to 51 percent in 1930 and to 76 percent in 1950. Graduation rates also increased, with the percentage of seventeen-year-olds who completed high school rising from 6 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1930 and to 59 percent in 1950.36 These statistics, however, belie the disparities in the quality of education among Philadelphia’s high schools in this era. Among the city’s twenty-one high schools, for example, two were application-only academic high schools (Central High School of Philadelphia and Philadelphia High School for Girls), and three were vocational schools (Bok, Dobbins, and Mastbaum). In addition to these official designations, many schools held unofficial reputations related to the racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic characteristics of their neighborhoods and student populations. These reputations were a mix of personal experience, anecdotes, and rumor, but they had real implications for the quality of education offered at different schools. As the U.S. Supreme Court found in Green v. New Kent County School Board (1968), racially identifiable schools, where residents knew which schools were “white” schools and which were “black” schools, were a barrier to a unitary school district offering real equality of opportunity.37 In Philadelphia, schools with bad reputations had difficulty attracting experienced teachers and therefore had a larger number of substitute teachers. These schools were also more likely to lose academically talented students who transferred to schools with better reputations. In addition, if the students who remained at these schools did not score well on IQ tests, administrators were more likely to follow the tenets of life adjustment education and assign students to modified nonacademic curricula. Given the discrimination blacks faced in the city’s housing market and the racial prejudice that informed the unofficial reputations of schools, black students were much more likely to attend high schools offering watered-down courses, such as Franklin.
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