Logan’s fight to equalize curricular options in mostly black schools ran up against the national push for high schools to group young people based on standardized test scores and to focus attention on the highest scoring teenagers. James Conant’s nationally published reports on education, The American High School Today (1959) and Slums and Suburbs (1961), were at the forefront of this push for more testing and tracking.96 While Conant was a prolific writer and speaker on educational issues during and after his tenure as president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, The American High School Today and Slums and Suburbs reached a broad popular audience. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation and published by McGraw-Hill, the reports were treated as news stories rather than academic reports. To this end, a meticulously planned media campaign accompanied Conant’s work and garnered favorable stories in Life, Look, Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report.97 In these nationally published reports, Conant endorsed more extensive standardized testing that would enable counselors to precisely identify students’ abilities and guide them to appropriate courses of study. Through this method, he suggested, the comprehensive high school could remain true to its meritocratic mission by fine-tuning the process of curriculum differentiation. While he emphasized the benefits of curriculum differentiation for students at all ability levels, the majority of Conant’s recommendations focused on improving the quality of education offered to “gifted” students.
Conant’s reports had influence because they were timely and pragmatic. His first report was published in the wake of the launch of the Soviet Sputnik space satellite in October 1957. Concerned that the United States was losing the cold war because of a failing school system, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The NDEA allocated millions of dollars to improve science, math, and foreign language training and to better educate gifted students. In this context, Conant’s recommendations to expand ability grouping, increase the number of counselors, and emphasize the training of gifted students largely overlapped with the educational practices already in place at high schools across the country.98 In addition to endorsing the existing practices of guidance and grouping, Conant also avoided the controversial subject of integration in The American High School Today. When he addressed the issue in Slums and Suburbs, he argued that improving vocational programs should take precedence over integration: “Antithetical to our free society as I believe de jure segregation to be, I think it would be far better for those who are agitating for the deliberate mixing of children to accept de facto segregated schools as a consequence of a present housing situation and to work for the improvement of slum schools.”99 As was the case with Conant’s other educational recommendations, many school officials embraced his position on segregation because it required little immediate action. In Philadelphia, the educational status quo Conant endorsed meant that teenagers would continue to attend high schools that were both highly segregated and rigidly differentiated in terms of curricular options and access to college.
The post-Sputnik emphasis on testing and tracking dovetailed with the national discourse of cultural deprivation. From the late 1950s through the end of the 1960s, educators and social scientists published books and articles and held conferences and seminars on the topic of cultural deprivation. They sought to examine, explain, and remedy the lagging academic skills of low-income students and students of color in urban schools. While cultural deprivation research influenced policy makers and professional educators and reached a wide popular audience, the term acquired its strength from its vagueness. Some commentators, like Conant, used cultural deprivation as a synonym for slum, and called for larger and better staffs and more money for schools in these areas.100 Other researchers used the term to describe what they called the “cultural differences” between racial and socioeconomic groups.
The Research Conference on Education and Cultural Deprivation, held at the University of Chicago in June 1964, for example, gathered over thirty leading social scientists and received financial support from the U.S. Office of Education. The authors of the conference report noted that they used the term “culturally disadvantaged or culturally deprived because we believe the roots of their problem may in large part be traced to their experiences in homes which do not transmit the cultural patterns necessary for the types of learning characteristic of the schools and the larger society.”101 While the report’s recommendations laid the groundwork for school breakfast and lunch programs and Head Start preschool education for low-income children, the authors offered few specific ideas regarding curricular guidelines, materials, or methods to improve academic performance. Moreover, the report’s emphasis on the deficits of low-income students omitted any discussion of the students’ talents or recommendations for structural changes to schools.102
As the conference report influenced federal educational policies, Frank Riessman’s The Culturally Deprived Child (1962) was being widely used in teacher preparation programs and was reaching a broad popular audience. Riessman, a professor of education and psychology at New York University, contended that the number of culturally deprived children in the nation’s largest cities had increased from one in ten in 1950 to one in three in 1960. “Effective education of the ‘one in three’ who is deprived,” he argued, “requires a basic, positive understanding of his traditions and attitudes.”103 Riessman critiqued educators for seeking to make low-income students into “replicas of middle-class children” and encouraged teachers to develop an “empathetic understanding” of “culturally deprived” students.104 Yet, as Riessman sought to refocus the approach of schools to educating low-income students, he also implied that “lower-class culture” and “middle-class culture” were clearly defined and delineated ways of life.105
While these cultural deprivation researchers differed in their recommendations, their cultural approach to educational performance allowed other commentators to use students’ backgrounds as a deterministic explanation for academic failure. The Philadelphia school board, for example, picked up cultural deprivation theories in its curricular recommendations. Emphasizing that “everyone is different,” a 1962 Philadelphia public school report outlined curriculum plans for three groups of students: a college preparatory course for the “academically talented,” commercial and vocational curricula for “student[s] who will enter the world of work” after graduation, and a modified course for “slower learning” or “culturally deprived” students.106 Philadelphia’s schools, therefore, remained devoted to tracking in the early 1960s and continued to disproportionately track black students away from the academic programs and into the modified curriculum.
Despite this racialized tracking and the increased number of segregated schools, the school board continued to be proactive in its insistence that it did not discriminate against black students or support segregated schools. A 1960 report prepared by Wetter, “For Every Child: The Story of Integration in the Philadelphia Public Schools,” made this point emphatically. While Logan and other civil rights advocates began discussing potential legal action to force the board to address de facto segregation, Wetter praised the board’s early adoption of intercultural education materials as evidence of progress on integration. “As early as 1943,” Wetter recounted, “the Superintendent of Schools led the way for the development of a comprehensive program in human relations.”107 Here again, the school board manipulated the Fellowship Commission’s intercultural education efforts to deflect criticism and delay action on school segregation. Wetter also contended that “what has been called by certain groups ‘de facto segregation’ in some schools has not been the result of policy of The Board of Public Education,” but that “the record of progress of the Philadelphia Public Schools in the integration movement is among the best, if not the best, of those of the great cities of the Nation.” The Philadelphia school board refused to back down from the de facto rationale that school segregation was the result of private housing decisions for which the board had no power or responsibility.<
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In the 1950s, civil rights advocates who fought educational discrimination in Philadelphia’s public schools met far more defeats than victories. The work of Maurice Fagan, Floyd Logan, and the numerous activists and parents who challenged prejudice and inequality in schools is instructive for what it reveals about the challenges of fighting de facto school segregation. Black Philadelphians and their allies faced a de facto dilemma that has emerged as the fundamental barrier to integrated and equal education in the half-century since Brown. Everyone could see that schools were becoming more racially segregated, and there was substantial evidence that these racially separate schools were not equal. Yet foes of de facto segregation, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, lacked legal redress.
Logan and Fagan challenged discrimination on a student-by-student and school-by-school basis, while also looking beyond the neighborhood level to change school board policies. Their tactics helped to secure new school buildings, introduce intercultural educational materials in the curriculum, and, to a limited extent, expand curriculum programs at majority-black schools. Their efforts were overwhelmed, however, by discriminatory housing policies that produced residential segregation and the school board’s refusal to admit that its school construction, zoning, and transfer policies contributed to segregation, or that it should take any affirmative steps to address this segregation. While these educational advocates struggled to change school policy, as the next chapter shows, they also waged a media battle to convince their fellow Philadelphians that the city operated a segregated school system that needed to be restructured.
CHAPTER 4
From Little Rock to Philadelphia
Making de Facto School Segregation a Media Issue
The only thing we did wrong was to let segregation stay so long.
—Protestors at Philadelphia NAACP picketing a school construction site, May 1963
In her introduction to Freedom North, historian Jeanne Theoharis contends that in “history textbooks, college classrooms, films, and popular celebration, African American protest movements in the North appear as ancillary and subsequent to the ‘real’ movement in the South.”1 Such histories, Thomas Sugrue suggests, “are as much the product of forgetting as of remembering.”2 Thanks to work by Theoharis, Sugrue, Komozi Woodard, Martha Biondi, Matthew Countryman, and many other historians, the story of civil rights in the North is no longer a footnote. Calling attention to northern civil rights struggles was also a cause for concern for Philadelphia activists in the 1950s and 1960s. National news coverage, as well as Philadelphia newspapers and television stations, paid far more attention to school segregation in the South than to similar stories in northern cities. This media coverage laid the groundwork for the historical amnesia regarding northern civil rights. At the same time, however, Philadelphia’s civil rights activists tried to use the media to make de facto segregation an issue that the school board could not avoid. Black educational activist Floyd Logan, for example, found the widest audience for the issue of Philadelphia’s school segregation in the wake of the integration crisis at Little Rock’s Central High School in the fall of 1957.
The coverage of the Little Rock crisis in Philadelphia’s print and broadcast media raised the profile of the city’s own educational issues to a higher level than in the previous two decades. Logan took advantage of this opportunity to secure the school board’s first statement on non-discrimination and to foreground school segregation as an issue to be taken up by the city’s civil rights advocates. Three years before Little Rock, Logan tried to raise awareness of de facto segregation following the first Brown decision in May 1954. Logan sent telegrams to city and state school officials requesting immediate compliance with the decision. In his message to the city school board, Logan argued that “the time is opportune for the Philadelphia School district to redistrict in such a manner as to effect integration of its 10 all-colored schools and its many predominantly colored schools.” Similarly, Logan called Pennsylvania governor John Fine’s attention to the existence of segregated schools in Philadelphia and other parts of the state and asked him to ensure that Pennsylvania would “conform to the momentous decision of the United States Supreme Court.”3 Logan’s attempts to link the Brown decision with segregation in Philadelphia went unnoticed in the mainstream press. Unlike the month of front-page coverage Little Rock received in Philadelphia’s newspapers, the Brown decision was quickly summarized in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the Philadelphia Inquirer as a southern case.
Without an ongoing story line, these mainstream papers covered the Brown decision for only two days. Only the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s leading black newspaper, continued to discuss school segregation in Philadelphia and Logan’s work to eradicate it. In addition to his lobbying of politicians and school officials, his advocacy for black students and parents, and his research on the schools’ practices and policies, Logan essentially functioned as the Tribune’s education reporter in these years. Logan played a central role in the network that circulated news of civil rights issues. His collection of information on the Philadelphia schools and his persistent requests for action by school officials enabled the Tribune to make the city’s school segregation a recurring topic at a time it received little attention in the white press.4 Logan also worked as an amateur archivist, keeping detailed records of his correspondence with school officials (records that provide the foundation for this and the previous chapter). Using the visibility of Little Rock as leverage, Logan helped the school segregation issue in Philadelphia reach a larger audience in the black community and set the stage for larger protests in the early 1960s.
SCHOOL SEGREGATION AS A MEDIA EVENT
While the Brown decisions came and went quietly from Philadelphia newspapers and broadcast media, the struggle over integration in Little Rock was on the front page of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the Philadelphia Inquirer for over twenty-five days in September and October 1957.5 School segregation conflicts in Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas also became front-page stories.6 In addition to print media, Philadelphia’s CBS affiliate, WCAU-TV, sent reporter Ken Mayer to Little Rock to track what WCAU-TV called “the nation’s newest and most threatening powder keg.”7 The Little Rock crisis also received nightly coverage on national television news, and was followed by a large national audience of viewers that journalist Daniel Schorr described as “a national evening séance.”8 As historian Taylor Branch has argued, “[t]he prolonged duration and military drama of the siege made Little Rock the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era.”9 Television news established its legitimacy in the late 1950s in large part by covering civil rights stories like Little Rock. Unlike American Bandstand and other entertainment programs that pursued a national audience by avoiding controversy, television news relied on the visuality and topicality of certain racial incidents to establish its authority to frame national issues for a national audience.10
At the same time, media coverage of Little Rock and other cases of “massive resistance” in the South presented racism and school segregation as a uniquely southern problem. Launched in 1956 by U.S. senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, massive resistance described a group of student placement and school funding laws designed to maintain southern school segregation in defiance of federal court orders. Although not all southern whites supported these policies, massive resistance gained broad and vocal support among diehard segregationists and many southern politicians. The pro-segregationist views underlying massive resistance were put into action by white mobs who harassed and threatened black students who sought to attend formerly all-white schools across the South, including in cities such as Charlotte, Nashville, and, most famously, Little Rock.11 Racial violence in small southern towns also made its way into American living rooms. As legal scholar Peter Irons notes, “most white Americans learned about mob violence in town like Cilton (TN), Man-field (TX) and Sturgis (KY) from television news reports.”12 For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, these arch-segregat
ionist politicians, white mobs, and public confrontations were absent from the northern fight over school integration, and the less visible causes of de facto school segregation did not receive the same level of media scrutiny. This media invisibility made school segregation in northern cities like Philadelphia much more difficult to fight.
FIGURE 14. WCAU-TV advertised “on the scene” reports from Little Rock with newscaster Ken Mayer. September 11, 1957. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.
Nevertheless, local events linked Little Rock to Philadelphia. Just days after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop nine black students from enrolling at previously all-white Central High School, rumors of a shooting in South Philadelphia sparked racial tensions among teenagers. The Philadelphia police commissioner attributed these tensions in part to Little Rock, and the Philadelphia Inquirer criticized the perception that racial tensions were exclusively a southern story.13 The events at Little Rock’s Central High School also motivated black teenagers in Philadelphia to challenge the discriminatory admissions policies at American Bandstand, whose broadcast studio was located in West Philadelphia.14
FIGURE 15. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the connection between Little Rock and racial tensions among teenagers in South Philadelphia. October 2, 1957. Hugh Hutton/Philadelphia Inquirer.
The long shadow of Little Rock helped open the door, albeit slightly, for public discussions of local school segregation issues in Philadelphia. While national media coverage of Little Rock portrayed the “Little Rock Nine” in sympathetic terms vis-à-vis the white mob they encountered outside the school, the local mainstream media attention given to Philadelphia’s de facto school segregation was more ambivalent. On one hand, the Philadelphia story was less clear than Little Rock, and, at least until the early 1960s, it lacked the characters and images of the southern story. On the other, southern civil rights stories were safe for Philadelphia media in ways that local issues were not. Reading and watching stories about Little Rock required Philadelphians to form opinions, but did not necessarily require them to take action in their own city. In contrast, raising the specter of integration in Philadelphia forced citizens to consider changes to their schools, and mainstream newspapers and televisions stations were keenly aware that their audiences did not universally support civil rights activism in the city.
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