Beyond allocating time to other forms of educational discrimination, the school board’s rejection of Logan’s proposals in 1953 influenced the Fellowship Commission’s shift of attention to admissions quotas. “The Executive Committee decided about two years ago to postpone approaches to the School System on the matter of ‘one-group’ schools,” Fellowship Commission chairman David Ullman noted in April 1955.66 Fagan and the other members of the Fellowship Commission were reluctant to jeopardize their close relationship with the public schools. When Fagan wrote to the new president of the school board Leon Obermayer in 1955 to request support for the Ford proposal, for example, he proclaimed that “The Fellowship Commission has demonstrated over the past fourteen years that it will not usurp the prerogatives of the educator and that it can be and is one of the staunchest champions of the School System.”67 While this approach allowed the Fellowship Commission to influence the classroom experience in many schools through intercultural education seminars and materials, it also meant that the largest civil rights organization in Philadelphia, during its most influential period, failed to address one of the most significant civil rights issues in the city. More insidiously, the school board took up the Fellowship Commission’s antidiscrimination language to reject Logan’s calls for an affirmative policy on integration. Even before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision led southern politicians and segregationists to develop their strategies for massive resistance, the Philadelphia school board used a combination of tactics to position itself as antidiscrimination while supporting policies that contributed to de facto schools segregation.
BUILDING A SEGREGATED SCHOOL SYSTEM
The school board’s refusal to develop a policy on de facto segregation was based on the claim that school segregation was a housing-related development beyond the board’s control. Despite this assertion, the school board’s construction decisions after World War II exacerbated segregation in the city’s schools and made Logan’s work even more difficult. Of the twenty-two new elementary, junior high, and senior high schools built after World War II, all but three were built in either new suburbanizing white neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts or in expanding black neighborhoods. As a result, school site selection was the determining factor in creating one-group schools that were almost all white or all black.68
These school placement decisions followed logically from governmental policies, initiated during the New Deal, that facilitated residential segregation in private and public housing. In Philadelphia’s private housing market, less than 1 percent of new construction was available to black home buyers in the 1950s.69 These racially distinct housing markets, supported by government dollars and abetted by the lack of federal and local antidiscrimination oversight on housing, provided the foundation for the de facto rational for segregated schools. White homeowners and renters who expected to live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods saw their preferences reflected in the school construction decisions. For black parents, new construction relieved school overcrowding, but given the school board’s history of second-class treatment of majority-black schools, siting schools in mostly black neighborhoods was a mixed blessing.
A leading concern for black parents and educational activists like Logan was that students at majority black schools would receive a lower quality of education than that available at majority white schools. Their concerns were well founded because the racial demographics of schools were an important factor in determining the curricular options available to students. The most glaring examples of the relationship among school construction, de facto segregation, and school curriculum are Northeast High School, Thomas Edison High School, and Franklin High School. The students at the all-boys Northeast High School attended one of the best public schools in the city. The school opened in 1905, but the school’s history dated to the 1890s when it operated as the Northeast Manual Training School. With a focus on engineering rather than a strictly academic curriculum, the school became the second most prestigious public school for young men in Philadelphia, trailing only Central High School.70 By the early 1950s, the school had a well-developed alumni network that raised money to provide college loans to students and awards for championship sports teams.71 In the fifty years since the school opened at Eighth Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia, the racial demographics of the neighborhood changed from majority white to a mix of white ethnic groups and black residents. As a result, unlike many other schools in the city, Northeast’s student body in the mid-1950s was evenly divided between black and white students.
All of this changed in February 1957. Halfway through the school year, two-thirds of the teachers and a number of students left the school at Eighth and Lehigh for a new Northeast High in the fast-growing suburban neighborhoods at the edge of the city. The school board and Northeast’s alumni started discussing the new high school in the early 1950s, but for most of the teachers and students left behind at the old school (renamed Thomas Edison High School), the move happened abruptly. Almost overnight, the school’s name, most experienced teachers, and alumni network disappeared. The black and working-class white students who attended Northeast High School as sophomores and juniors in 1955 and 1956 were left to graduate from Thomas Edison High School when the new Northeast High opened in February of their senior year. The students left behind at Edison selected “hiatus” as their senior yearbook theme. This yearbook also showed that the new Northeast High secretively moved the school’s athletic trophies. While the yearbooks of the previous graduating class described the trophy case as “the symbol of the greatness of our school,” the “hiatus” seniors used before and after pictures of the full and empty trophy case to depict the loss of the most visible daily evidence of the school’s history.72
The Northeast section of Philadelphia expanded rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s, with new tract homes, shopping centers, and industrial parks replacing farmland. Almost all of the area’s population increase came from white families, many of whom moved from racially changing neighborhoods in other parts of the city. The Northeast’s small number of black residents lived in sections that dated back over a hundred years, but other black and Chinese American families who sought to move into the Northeast section were met with protests by white homeowners.73 Real estate agents turned away several black families who sought to move to Northeast neighborhoods in the late 1950s, claiming that they “were not accepting any colored applicants” or that they had been “instructed not to sell to anyone … that might disturb the neighborhood.”74 In addition, historian Guian McKee has shown how the Northeast benefited from Philadelphia’s industrial renewal program, which decentralized the city’s industry by building and renovating industrial areas. New industrial parks in the Northeast were not accessible by subway, trolley, or commuter rail, and McKee argues that “this orientation towards automobile transportation reinforced preexisting patterns of employment discrimination.”75 The racial segregation of Northeast High, therefore, followed housing and employment discrimination and was not the result of innocent private decisions.
FIGURE 11. The students who attended Northeast High School as sophomores and juniors were left to graduate from Thomas Edison High School when the new Northeast High School opened in February of their senior year. They selected “hiatus” as their yearbook theme. June 1957. Philadelphia School District Archives.
The case of Edison and Northeast reflected the growing divide between public schools in affluent neighborhoods and those in working-class and poor communities. Although both schools were technically in the same school system, Northeast represented a process of suburbanization within city lines. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling against cross-district metropolitan desegregation plans in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), and the continued defense of de facto segregation by courts, politicians, and parents, meant that this school inequality became commonplace nationally. Educational scholar Jeannie Oakes describes this process of providing already advantaged students with more advantages as a process of “mult
iplying inequalities” that facilitates and rationalizes “the inter-generational transfer of social, educational, and political status and [constrains] social and economic mobility.”76 Northeast High’s enrollment criteria made this transfer of privilege explicit. The school board limited enrollment in the new high school to students from this suburban Northeast area, and two-thirds of the first fifteen hundred students at the school transferred from Olney High School, Lincoln High School, and Frankford High School, which were also between 97 percent and 99 percent white.77 Among students from the old Northeast High (Edison High School), only those whose grandfathers were alumni of the school could transfer. This policy left the working-class black and white students at Edison High School to be taught by inexperienced and substitute teachers. While the new Northeast High School was built in a sprawling campus style that resembled suburban schools being built in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Edison students were left with the aging building formerly occupied by Northeast High.78
FIGURES 12 AND 13. Before and after pictures depict the loss of the school’s trophies and history. The prior class’s yearbook described the trophy case as “the symbol of the greatness of our school.” June 1957. Philadelphia School District Archives.
Neither Northeast’s alumni nor the school board ever explicitly mentioned school segregation as the motivation for building the new Northeast High School. William Loesch, an alumnus of the school and banker who sat on the school board, had lobbied school administrators to consider building a new Northeast High since Central High School received a new building in 1939.79 The alumni association advanced this campaign in 1954 when it met with Add Anderson, the school board’s business manager, who controlled the budget for new school construction. In approving the plans for a new Northeast High, Anderson cited the need for a high school to serve the growing population in the “Greater Northeast” section of the city.80 Commenting on school construction in 1962, school superintendent Allen Wetter also argued that “population” and “cost” were the main considerations, and that “the segregation issue was no factor at all in the making of … recommendations for new schools.”81 In letters and phone calls with Floyd Logan, moreover, both Anderson and Wetter continued to insist that the school’s building policy was color-blind and that school segregation was a housing-related development beyond the school’s control.82 The case of Northeast High belies these claims. By choosing to build a new high school in the suburban section of the city, the school board created a school that enrolled 99 percent white students through the mid-1960s. The drastically dissimilar racial demographics at Northeast High and Edison High were indicative of the growing segregation in Philadelphia’s public high schools in these years. By 1961, while the total high school population was 34 percent black, four schools were over 90 percent black, and seven schools were over 90 percent white.83 Despite the race-neutral rhetoric, the school board’s construction decisions built and maintained de facto segregated schools like Northeast High.
In building the new Northeast High, the school board not only exacerbated school segregation; it also left students at Edison High with a limited range of course offerings. Whereas the school once offered a full range of academic, commercial, and trade courses, the students at Edison were channeled into lower-level vocational courses like paper hanging, painting, simple woodwork, and upholstery.84 These limited curricular options were commonplace at majority-black high schools in the city, where school officials used IQ tests to determine the appropriate tracks for students. One such school, Franklin High, provides an important counterpoint to the experience of the new Northeast High.
After five years of pressure from Logan, the school board started construction on a new Franklin High School in 1955. Although construction on Northeast High and Franklin started in the same year and both new buildings cost $6 million, the types of education offered within these buildings differed dramatically. While the students at Northeast High took college preparatory courses and commercial courses that would prepare them for employment, most students at Franklin were offered the same watered-down vocational options as students at Edison. Logan tried to address these inadequacies before the board released architectural plans for the new building.85 As the new high school building neared completion in September 1959, Logan, along with the Reverend William Ischie and the Reverend Leon Sullivan, pastor of Zion Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, met with school board members to demand that students at this new building not receive the same unequal education offered to students for years at Franklin.86 Wetter again dismissed Logan’s demands, arguing that Franklin was not districted on a racial basis and that it was the policy of the schools to gear course instruction to the capacity of the students, as determined by IQ tests.87 Using this policy, the school board rated Franklin High as a “minus” school because the average student IQ score was twenty points below the city average. The plus and minus ratings were unpublished, but in his research Logan learned that the school board listed most all-black and majority-black schools in the minus category.88 These IQ-based ratings dictated that the curriculum available to students at Franklin High would be different from that at Northeast High. Across the school system, this curriculum differentiation most often meant that administrators tracked black students into courses that limited their prospects for future employment and higher education.89
TABLE 3 PERCENTAGE OF BLACK STUDENTS IN PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOLS BY DISTRICT, 1956–1965
SOURCE: Philadelphia Board of Education, Division of Research, “A Ten-Year Summary of the Distribution of Negro Pupils in the Philadelphia Public Schools, 1957–1966,” December 23, 1966, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2.3, folder 6, TUUA; “Number of Negro Teachers and Percentage of Negro Students in Philadelphia Senior High Schools, 1956–1957 [n.d.],” FL collection, Acc 469, box 14, folder 10,TUUA.
CHART 1
SOURCE: William Odell, “Educational Survey Report for the Philadelphia Board of Public Education,” February 1965, Philadelphia School District Archives.
Aware of the dangers of racialized tracking, Logan continued to press Wetter regarding the academic reorganization of Franklin. “In approving the expenditures of more than $6,000,000 for creation of the new Benjamin Franklin High School,” Logan wrote, “it is evident that the Board of Public Education had in mind an improved type of high school, not only in building and facilities, but in curriculum, student body, and so forth. … Otherwise, if the status quo is maintained, the expenditure of such a large sum of money will not be justified.”90 Logan’s concern was prescient. Months before the school board officially dedicated the new building in May 1961, the first class of students to attend classes in the new building prepared for graduation. Only 21 of the 151 students (14 percent) who started three years earlier graduated.91 Echoing the growing literature on the low educational achievement of “culturally deprived” minority children in urban schools, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin placed the blame for this low graduation rate on the school’s student body. The Bulletin’s editorial argued that Franklin’s students came from “‘migrant families’ … newly arrived from the Deep South,” that many grew up in “homes in which there never has been a recognized father or husband,” and that in Franklin’s “sanitary halls, under the authority of its educated and gentlemanly faculty, some students experienced their only real contact with civilization.”92 Logan criticized the Bulletin’s attempts to blame Franklin’s students in a letter to Wetter and several newspapers. In the letter, Logan also reminded Wetter of his promise to reorganize and expand the curriculum at Franklin to include programs in mathematics, science, and foreign language, and to publicize these changes to the community in a brochure.93 In the fall of 1961, as a result of Logan’s years of work and a citywide increase in academic guidance programs at mostly black high schools, the board introduced new curriculum options at Franklin, and graduation rates at the school increased slowly through the early 1960s.
The limited educational opportunities available to black a
nd working-class students at Edison and Franklin were not anomalies, but rather were in line with the school board’s curriculum tracking policies. Although the school board publicly stated that IQ tests, not race, were the criteria for this tracking, race often came to stand in as evidence of the limited potential of students in majority-black schools. In a letter describing Edison High to a member of an outside evaluation committee, for example, Wetter wrote: “because the population of the school is about half Negro there are many slow learning pupils.”94 Whether through test scores or assumptions about performance made by teachers and counselors, administrators disproportionately tracked black students into lower-level programs. Drawing on her two decades of research, Jeannie Oakes shows that tracking labels, once affixed to students, are difficult to overcome and shape how teachers view students, as well as how students view their peers and themselves. “Because public schools are governmental agencies,” Oakes argues, “tracking is a governmental action that classifies and separates students and thereby determines the amount, the quality, and even the value of the government service (education) that students receive.”95 The school board’s decision to build schools in parts of the city where they were guaranteed to be one-group schools, such as Northeast and Franklin, was a double injury for black students because racially isolated schools maintained de facto segregation and naturalized curriculum tracking on the basis of race.
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