Located in the lower North Philadelphia area, Franklin opened as an all-boys school in 1939. The school occupied a structure built in 1894 to house Central High School, one of the city’s two prestigious academic high schools, which moved to the Olney area above North Philadelphia in 1936. In the years after World War II, Franklin operated a daytime high school as well as an evening Veterans School, offering accelerated college preparatory courses and refresher courses for World War II veterans. This Veterans School enrolled more than ten thousand men and women from 1945 to 1955, half of whom continued on to college or technical school.38
The students attending Franklin during the day, over 95 percent of whom were black, were not as fortunate. While the school attended to the education of veterans, allocating school board funds to cover library materials and offer supplies not covered by the Veterans Administration, the regular day students attended one of the most poorly funded high schools in the system. In April 1951, a visiting committee from the Middle States Association of School and Colleges catalogued the shortcomings of the school. The committee members noted that Franklin had the worst attendance record in the city and that only 20 to 30 percent of the students who started school in tenth grade graduated. Although the visiting committee made few direct criticisms of the board, the members did criticize what they viewed to be the school board’s policy of grouping students with low IQ scores in one school.39 Logan raised this criticism throughout the 1950s, but the school board, following educational thought of this era, continued to place students in different curriculum tracks based on their IQ scores, junior high school grades, and teacher recommendations.
Illustrative of this educational practice at Franklin was Operation Fix-up. In this program, students went to an “outdoor classroom” built in an alley between row homes in South Philadelphia at Eighteenth and Cleveland Streets to learn about home repairs and home maintenance. With supervision and direction from the Redevelopment Authority and the Citizen’s Council on City Planning, the students helped to lay concrete, hang doors, and repair brick outhouses to be used as trash can shelters, among other tasks.40 Explaining the motivation for Operation Fix-up, Franklin principal Lewis Horowitz told the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin:
We realized that many of our boys would never learn about proper lighting, furnishing, sanitation and the like from their home surroundings. We also suspected that many had not the ability to become workmen in the skilled trades which required long years of training. So we decided to shift the emphasis in our instruction to make it more realistic.41
Horowitz’s belief in educating “nonacademic” students for the jobs available to them agreed with the tenets of life adjustment education, an outgrowth of the vocational education movement that enjoyed national popularity among high school educators from 1945 to the early 1950s.42 Historian Herbert Kliebard describes life adjustment education as conveying the “social message” that “each new generation needed to internalize the social status quo.”43 Indeed, with black students and workers blocked from the skilled trades because of discrimination in the school’s union-sponsored apprenticeship classes, life adjustment education reinforced discriminatory employment practices.44 At best, then, this education provided students with training for unskilled construction jobs. At worst, the program increased the education gap between these students and those at other high schools, while normalizing slum clearance and providing urban renewal interests with free labor. In either case, Franklin was unique among Philadelphia high schools in offering this curriculum option.
The poor conditions at Franklin did not come as a surprise to Logan or to black teenagers and parents in the Franklin school community. However, the Middle States report offered Logan an opportunity to bring more attention to the inequities of segregated education. Logan wrote letters to the Philadelphia Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and both papers ran articles quoting the visiting committee’s description of Franklin as a “Jim Crow school.”45 Building on this publicity, Logan next organized a conference on the “Democratization of Philadelphia Public Schools.” On October 15, 1951, forty civic and cultural organizations, including the NAACP, black fraternities and sororities, and the Jewish Community Relations Council, met at the Fellowship Commission building to discuss how to break down segregation in the public schools. Discussing issues of zoning, teacher placement, and curriculum, the groups started to draw up resolutions to present to the school board. Logan and his colleagues recommended that the board state its policy with regard to integration, that teachers be assigned based on qualifications rather than race, and that intercultural ideals expressed in curriculum publications be implemented in zoning and put into practice in the classroom. These recommendations remained the focal points of Logan’s work for the next decade.46
Only three days after these resolutions were drafted, an incident at West Philadelphia High School (WPHS) broadened the scope of Logan’s critique of the public schools and increased his sense of the urgency of bringing these policy recommendations to the board. The principal at West Philadelphia High School, George Montgomery, singled out the schools’ black students and blamed them for increased crime in the school and the city.47 At a pep rally before the afternoon football game the next day, black students, who made up 30 percent of the student body, protested the principal’s remarks by sitting silently. That same day, a group of parents met with the principal to discuss his remarks. Among these parents were Granville Jones, a black Democratic state representative whose three children attended WPHS, and the Reverend E. Luther Cunningham, the treasurer of the NAACP branch and a board member of the Fellowship Commission, whose daughter was present at the assembly. In addition to these black leaders, other parents sent letters of concern to Floyd Logan and the NAACP asking them to address this issue with the school board. “I have written to most of the papers and done all I can at the present,” one parent wrote. “This is not right because we help to pay [the principal’s] salary too. Is this supposed to be where all are created equal and where ours as well as theirs die in wars for this country?”48 On October 26, representatives of the NAACP and the EEL met the school superintendent Louis Hoyer. “In a very few moments [the principal] has created a segregated school. … He has set aside one group of the student body to be looked at with contempt as a [minority] group,” Walter Gay Jr., an attorney representing the EEL, told the superintendent.49 The Reverend Jesse Anderson, a member of the Fellowship Commission and the minister of the West Philadelphia Episcopal parish, pointed out the gap between the school board’s intercultural rhetoric and the principal’s comments. “A goodly segment of the authorities, principals and teacher of this school system … have been getting away with literal murder in their handling of minority groups,” Anderson said. “I fail to see how you reconcile the inept racial attitude and expression of the principal with the beautiful pamphlets entitled ‘Democracy in Action,’ ‘Living Together,’ and ‘Openmindedness.’ ” 50 Gay and Anderson concluded by asking for Montgomery’s resignation. Superintendent Hoyer said that he regretted the principal’s comments, but that he would need to meet with Montgomery before he could make a decision.
In November 1951, the education committee of the NAACP and the EEL met to develop a plan to rid Philadelphia schools of discrimination. On December 15, at a second meeting with members of the school board, the committee from the NAACP and the EEL offered a plan for improvements at WPHS. The committee requested that Montgomery be removed, citing a loss of confidence of parents, students, and the community. They asked that black teachers be integrated into the school’s all-white faculty. Arguing that the primary job of the public school was “to teach the children of all the people,” the committee also called for an end to watered-down classes for black students deemed by teachers to be “slum” children. Finally, the committee requested that specific steps be taken to improve “human relations” at WPHS, including in-service courses in intercultural education for administrators and teachers, community meetings for
parents, adult education courses in intercultural education, the integration of black pupils into extracurricular activities at the school, and the organization of a fellowship club for students.51 As would become the pattern in the school board’s dealings with Logan, an official response was deferred until a later date.
Having not received a decision by the end of the 1952 school year, Logan appeared before the school board again on June 10. Gladys Thomas, the Philadelphia NAACP’s education director, and Dr. Marshall Shepard, a Baptist minister from West Philadelphia, represented the EEL. Logan reiterated the EEL’s requests for a policy on integration, for further integration of teachers at the senior high school level, and for zoning to promote desegregation. To emphasize his request that Franklin should be closed and replaced with a new building, Logan recounted that on a recent visit to the school’s auditorium, “it seemed more like the auditorium of a backwoods Southern school than part of a Philadelphia high school, and … the board should be ashamed to maintain a high school in that condition.” Moreover, he argued, bringing more equality to the schools would “deprive the Communists of their main source of propaganda and strength.”52 Following Logan, Shepard criticized the board for requesting more facts on discrimination in the schools, after Logan had already distributed a twenty-point list of statistics on segregation the previous year. “It [is] most unnecessary for us to tell the Board what it already [knows],” Shepard stated directly.53 Again, the board referred the EEL’s proposals to its policy committee for further study.
Following the meeting, Walter Biddle Saul, an attorney and the president of the school board, invited Logan and the other EEL members to an off-the-record conference with a smaller group of school officials. Saul opened the meeting by telling Logan that the EEL was wrong to refer to any schools as segregated schools. Saul further contended that “colored schools were such because of population,” that Logan “could not expect the schools to compel children to attend schools where they do not live,” that “state law requires the Board to accord to parents the right to send their children to schools of their choice,” and that many black parents favored having this option.54 Logan countered by arguing that Saul’s critiques did not meet the “serious study and consideration” promised by the board. Logan’s minutes from the meeting suggest that Saul conceded this point and appointed the school board’s policy committee chairwoman to study these “undemocratic problems” (Logan’s minutes also note the incongruity of Saul’s appointing a committee to study the problems that he had earlier declared not to exist).55 Before the close of the meeting, Saul stressed that he was opposed to the EEL’s publicizing these issues. Similarly, the school’s policy chairwoman said that the study would take at least four to five months, during which she hoped that her committee would not be under “too much pressure” from the EEL.56
While he waited for the completed report, Logan sent the committee more examples of discrimination in school zoning, classroom practices, and administrative appointments. After nine months, the school committee informed Logan that it had finished the report and invited him and other EEL members to a meeting on June 24, 1953. Logan later told the Philadelphia Tribune: “Though we were not overly optimistic of the investigation, we nevertheless felt that it would be at least fair.”57 After two years of waiting for the school board to take action on his evidence of discrimination in the schools, Logan was deeply disappointed with the report submitted by the committee. The report directly contradicted each of the points the EEL had raised: The school committee argued that the board’s teacher policies were in accord with the city’s Fair Employment Practices Ordinance, that there was no evidence of racial gerrymandering of district boundaries, that race was not a consideration in student transfers, and that white students were not transported by school bus to avoid majority black schools.58 After outlining these points, the committee went on to argue that the problem of integration was made “very much more acute and more difficult by the recent large Negro migration into Philadelphia,” and that black leaders had a responsibility to orient these “new Negro citizens to urban life and acceptable community behavior.” In addition to faulting black migrants for segregation, the school’s policy committee praised the school’s curriculum committee for undertaking “various projects to alleviate prejudice and neighborhood racial tensions through its courses on ‘Living Together’ and ‘Open-Mindedness.’” 59
For Logan, the problem with the committee’s report was that it was unwilling either to recognize the trend toward racial segregation in the schools or to recognize that the school board could take any steps to stem this trend. As Logan wrote to the chairwoman of the committee after the disappointing meeting, “we must sound a note of warning on the dangerous trend toward predominant and all colored schools. Many possibilities exist for reducing this trend and they should be explored. Specifically the Board must adopt a policy of planned mixing of as many students as population distribution will permit.”60 As he frequently did in his correspondence with school officials, Logan followed this recommendation with an appeal for the schools to live up to their antidiscrimination rhetoric. “Adoption by our Board of such democratic policies,” Logan wrote, “will put into practice our excellent intercultural courses [and in] this way we will be living ‘democracy,’ as well as teaching it.”61 As the school year began in 1953, Logan and his fellow educational activists in the EEL and NAACP finished a two-year encounter with the school board, in which time they saw little progress. Despite his frustration over the school board’s delays and refusal to address the policies that contributed to segregation, Logan continued to petition for an official policy on integration and pressed school officials to hold to their promise of building a new Franklin High School.
By 1953, the Philadelphia school board had crafted a solid defense for de facto segregation. First, it argued that segregated schools were the result of segregated housing patterns, over which it had no control. The naturalness of housing segregation became the centerpiece of the de facto rationale school officials in the North, Midwest, and West used to claim innocence with regard to school segregation. The de facto rationale replaced massive resistance in the South and has informed court decisions on school segregation since the early 1970s. This fiction of voluntary housing choice imposed an extremely difficult challenge for groups contesting school segregation. As desegregation expert Gary Or-field contends:
The school districts, which try to use housing as a justification for school segregation, often have the money to create what appears to be plausible evidence that local segregation is a product of choice by minority and white families, not discrimination. The plaintiffs usually lack the money to prove the history of housing discrimination. They cannot document the vicious cycles that led to those “choices.” They often lack the expertise to attack the validity of flawed survey data assessing the issues of guilt and remedy. Some courts adopt as facts what are speculative interpretations of misleading data used for inappropriate purposes.62
Although the NAACP did not file a lawsuit against school segregation in Philadelphia until 1961, Logan started gathering evidence in the late 1940s that he hoped would prove that racial segregation and unequal schools existed and were the result of official policy. Like Logan, educational activists in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and other cities faced off against school boards that maintained racial segregation while also denying its existence.63 The Philadelphia School Board thwarted the work of Logan and his fellow civil rights advocates by delaying action on proposals, holding off-the-record meetings, appointing internal committees to study the problem, and publishing reports that contradicted the evidence offered by critics.64 Outside the sight of the mainstream press and most citizens, these exchanges took place between a small group of school officials and the civil rights advocates who refused to let the issue be ignored. Without making any public statements favoring segregation, the school board honed a de facto rationale to avoid taking actions to integrate the schools.
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In addition to holding up residential segregation to explain school segregation, the Philadelphia school board also argued that it was being especially proactive in creating better racial attitudes among its students. The schools’ anti-prejudice curriculum efforts, it argued, were far more progressive than those found in other cities and constituted a sufficient response to the racial change in the city’s schools. Here, the school board co-opted the antidiscrimination rhetoric that Fagan and the Fellowship Commission were working to implement. The ease with which the school officials embraced intercultural education and sidestepped integration highlights the limits of the Fellowship Commission’s educational approach to discrimination. As Logan made increasingly vocal demands for the school board to address school segregation, much of the Fellowship Commission’s energy went into the Ford Foundation proposal and related intercultural education programs. The Fellowship Commission assigned the task of developing a position on segregated schools to its Fair Education Opportunities Committee, headed by Nathan Agran of the Jewish Community Relations Council and Walter Wynn of the Urban League (the committee’s minutes note that Fagan attended the majority of the monthly meetings, but that Logan attended only twice in a three-year period). The committee dedicated meetings in January and February 1953 to the question of segregated schools, citing segregated housing and pupil transfers from “mixed” schools as primary causes.65 The committee only discussed the issue periodically over the next two years, focusing more attention on removing discriminatory quotas in college and professional school admissions, and later on pushing for a city community college.
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