Still, Logan believed that building public awareness of de facto segregation was an essential step in forcing the school board to take action. In Philadelphia, as in cities from New York to Los Angeles, Little Rock influenced newspapers outside the South to examine race issues in their own cities.15 Little Rock prompted the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, to run the first school segregation story in the Philadelphia mainstream press, a joint interview with school superintendent Wetter and Charles Shorter, executive secretary of the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP. In his first public comments on the question of school segregation, Wetter argued that Philadelphia’s school board was doing its best to address integration. “I sincerely believe that our record of carrying on a full program of integration in Philadelphia is as fine as that found in any city across the America,” Wetter told the Inquirer.16 To rebut this claim, Shorter raised several of the issues to which Logan had called attention in the previous years, including school construction policies and student transfer policies. Wetter conceded: “We haven’t gone as far as we’d like to. … But I think that we’re on the right track.”
Although it was far from a promise to take action to address de facto segregation, Logan mailed the article to state officials, writing that “the interview establish[es] beyond reasonable doubt, the racial patterns as they exist with respect to pupils and teachers in our local school system.”17 As the Philadelphia Tribune ran frequent stories on the struggle over school segregation in the South, Logan pressed the Philadelphia school issue over the next year through repeated appeals to Wetter and state educational officials.18 Logan asked these officials to address boundary lines, student transfers, and teacher assignments. Logan escalated his appeals in February 1959 when he organized a group of black educational activists, including representatives from the Philadelphia NAACP, the Philadelphia Tribune, and several African American churches, who presented the school board with a petition outlining demands to implement nondiscriminatory policies. In a brief supporting this petition, Logan wrote: “For 26 years the Educational Equality League has been striving for interracial integration of Philadelphia public schools. In the beginning, we, too, favored the gradual approach. But today we are certain that we have advanced far beyond the gradual stage.”19 Despite his exasperation with the delays of the board, Logan was still forced to wait while the board considered his petition. Finally, on July 8, 1959, the school board unanimously adopted an official policy barring racial discrimination in the city’s public schools. The resolution, drafted by Philadelphia Tribune publisher E. Washington Rhodes, the only black member of the school board, outlined a color-blind policy, but did not address the affirmative steps requested by Logan:
WHEREAS the Board of Public Education seeks to provide the best education possible for all children; and
WHEREAS the Educational Equality League and other organizations have requested the adoption of written policies for full interracial integration of pupils and teachers:
Be it resolved, That the official policy of The Board of Public Education, School District of Philadelphia, continues to be that there shall be no discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin in the placement, instruction and guidance of pupils; the employment, assignment, training and promotion of personnel; the provision and maintenance of physical facilities, supplies and equipment; the development and implementation of the curriculum including the activities program; and in all other matters relating to the administration and supervision of the public schools and all policies related thereto; and,
Be it further resolved, That notice of this resolution be given all personnel.20
While Logan described the press coverage generated by the policy as one of his “major accomplishments,” the school board’s policy did not spell out specific actions with regard to school boundaries, school construction, or student assignments to promote integration.21 By stating that nondiscrimination “continued to be” the policy, moreover, the board sought to absolve itself of having ever supported discriminatory policies.22 Complicating the issue for Logan and his colleagues was that by 1960 even the board’s limited rhetorical commitments to antidiscrimination policies and programs raised concerns among white Philadelphians that civil rights groups exercised undue influence in the schools.
The Fellowship Commission was the first to feel the backlash against civil rights advocates working in the schools. As it built its relationship with the schools throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Fellowship Commission did not call public attention to its school efforts. The hostile reception the group received when working on housing issues, especially among working-class and middle-class white communities that feared the influx of black families into their neighborhoods, convinced Fagan and his colleagues of the difficulty of persuading people to hear the Fellowship Commission’s antidiscrimination message.23 A 1956 update on its educational seminars, for example, noted the importance of not “push[ing] the reluctant too hard and too early.” The report also noted that the Fellowship Commission responded to early fears that the group “might want to barge into classrooms” or “meddle in school affairs,” by foregoing its typical publicity campaign.24 The increased media and community attention to education in the wake of Little Rock, therefore, made the Fellowship Commission’s intercultural education ideas and language more important to the school system’s public presentations, while it also jeopardized the Fellowship Commission’s actual work in the schools.
This disjuncture between the school system’s public embrace of antidiscrimination language and actual classroom practices came to the forefront when the schools considered adding intercultural education materials to the high school curriculum in 1960. The textbook controversy that followed effectively ended the Fellowship Commission’s work in the public schools. In February 1960, following a wave of anti-Semitic vandalism in the Philadelphia area, Fagan met with David Horowitz, associate superintendent in charge of community relations.25 Fagan requested that a survey of textbooks be conducted to probe their treatment of the Nazi era in Germany, as well as issues of civil rights, housing, religious freedom, immigration, hate movements, and intergroup relations. Fagan suggested that the school board hire a sociologist to conduct the survey, but instead Horowitz conducted the initial review, which he submitted to the Fellowship Commission along with copies of the textbooks in question and a copy of the board’s new guide to the American History and Government course.26 This new course of study, prepared after the Fellowship Commission’s survey request, included a unit on the maintenance of good intercultural relations. As topics to investigate in the intercultural relations section, the guide listed “persecution of minority groups in Hitler’s Germany; Immigration laws affecting people of Asian origin and the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act; the Fair Employment Practices Commission; and Jim Crow racial restrictions and efforts to end segregation in the schools.”27 While this course guide marked the first time intercultural education was included in the official school curriculum, as opposed to in seminars or supplementary pamphlets, the guide noted that the time allotted to the units “should be determined by the need of the individual school.”28
After reviewing these materials, Fagan wrote to Horowitz to praise the intercultural relations unit as “excellent” and to thank him for the school’s prompt review of the textbooks. While Fagan was pleased that none of the textbooks contained “derogatory or prejudiced references,” he criticized the textbooks for omitting historical facts related to the Nazi era, for the absence of nonwhite people in illustrations, and for the “bland” treatment of civil rights. Fagan recommended that the school system advise textbook publishers of these shortcomings and request improvements.29 On July 5, 1960, Fagan presented these recommendations at a press conference that included Horowitz, Helen Bailey of the school’s curriculum committee, and two other school representatives. The two sides differed on what the schools could ask of the publishers. Fagan thought that the schools shared responsibility for advising pub
lishers when textbooks needed improvement, while Horowitz thought this was beyond the function of the school system. The meeting, nevertheless, ended cordially. The school representatives agreed to hold an annual meeting every fall with the social studies department heads and a group of concerned citizens led by the Fellowship Commission. The Fellowship Commission also agreed to write to the National Education Association and national intergroup agencies requesting that similar textbook studies be conducted in other cities, with the hope that publishers would be more likely to respond if several cities pressed for textbook changes.30
While this meeting was not noticeably different from the moderate demands the Fellowship Commission made of the schools in the past, the textbook survey sparked a controversy regarding the authority of the Fellowship Commission to advise the public schools. On July 6, the day after the meeting, the Bulletin announced that the school board planned to add a unit on intercultural relations to the high school’s social studies classes in the fall.31 While the Fellowship Commission’s textbook survey in February 1960 influenced the school’s decision to develop these units in the following month, the Bulletin article gave the impression that the school board drafted the unit as an immediate response to the prior day’s meeting. The newspaper exploited this confusion in an editorial on July 10, 1960, titled “Indoctrination Course.” “Within 24 hours,” the editorial charged:
the educators announced that next fall … pupils will be instructed on Jim Crowism, on efforts to end school segregation, on slums and housing, on the importance of city planning. How they will be instructed will be the fascinating thing to see. In accordance with the strong beliefs of the Fellowship Commission? In accordance with the equally strong and often quite different beliefs of the taxpaying parents whose schools these are?32
Superintendent Wetter responded with a letter published in the following Sunday’s paper. Wetter wrote to assure readers that “no new courses were developed in 24 hours to meet deficiencies cited in the Commission’s report,” and that the materials in intercultural relations and urban renewal had been in preparation for several months.33
Wetter’s letter, however, ran below a second Bulletin editorial that criticized him for “knuckling under” to the wishes of the Fellowship Commission. The editors pointed out what they viewed as a conflict between the beliefs of the Fellowship Commission and those of other city residents:
Moderation, even in instructing against bigotry, is the point of the matter. The Fellowship is sincere and well within its rights in espousing a rapid end to what it believes to be evil—housing segregation, for example. Yet, many a kindly citizen would be astonished to find that by the Fellowship’s indices he would be ruled a bigot. The public schools belong to all Philadelphians. Many of these owners of the schools would deem it wrong if they were used as told to speed social progress under an extreme definition thereof.34
The readers’ letters that the Bulletin choose to publish as “evidence that moderation is the wise course” point to a mounting segregationist backlash to the Fellowship Commission and its moderate civil rights work. One reader wondered by “what authority [the Fellowship Commission] have become judges of school textbooks,” and argued that “the taxpaying public is sick to death of narrow-minded bigots … seeking undeserved privileges.” Another reader, calling the Fellowship Commission “propaganda artists,” noted that “they’ll have fewer and fewer children to deal with as the free-thinking opposition continues removing to the suburbs in search of more independent schools.”35 Portraying themselves as taxpayers willing to move to the suburbs to avoid the encroachment of civil rights “propaganda artists,” these letter writers used the rhetoric of private property rights similar to the white homeowners’ groups that fought against neighborhood integration.36 This language also anticipated the antibusing activists who described “neighborhood schools” being unfairly threatened by “forced busing.”37 In the case of the textbook controversy, making sections on the Holocaust and Jim Crow optional parts of the school curriculum prompted charges of indoctrination from the city’s largest newspaper and many of its readers.
In his reply to these editorials, Fagan said that the Fellowship Commission had no problem with the editors recommending moderation, noting that the Fellowship Commission had been charged with being too moderate for its position on fair housing legislation. “Our criticism … is not leveled at moderation,” Fagan offered, “but rather at those who are so frightened by the label ‘controversial’ that they not only avoid but oppose efforts to explore all sides of such controversies.” Fagan concluded by asking, “Is it really too much to call for social studies textbooks to deal forthrightly and fairly with the pros and cons of the issues affecting the security, rights, liberties, opportunities, relationships and responsibilities of all racial, religious, and ethnic groups?”38
Despite the controversy caused by the Bulletin editorials, the new units on intercultural education and urban renewal entered the curriculum in the fall of 1960. Through 1961, Fagan corresponded with Horowitz regarding errors and misstatements in the textbooks and met with the heads of the social studies departments to discuss additional intercultural resources for these units. The textbook controversy, however, ended the close relationship between the Fellowship Commission and the school system. Isolated from the public schools, Fagan and the Fellowship Commission turned its attention to a campaign to establish a community college in Philadelphia.39
Unlike the highly visible integration crisis in Little Rock, the school segregation crisis in Philadelphia played out in letters, policy statements, newspaper articles, and editorials rather than on school steps or television screens. Like Fagan’s often co-opted intercultural education initiatives, the heightened profile of Philadelphia’s segregation problem, which Floyd Logan had worked so long to foster, was a mixed blessing. Publicity made more people aware that school segregation was not strictly a southern issue, but left open the question of how and by whom this issue should be addressed. Logan’s position, that the school board should implement affirmative policies to promote integration, gained popularity among many civil rights advocates, but received little citywide publicity and was not enough to effect change in the school board’s policy. The school board sidestepped Logan’s demands by co-opting the Fellowship Commission’s antidiscrimination rhetoric and refusing to commit to any specific actions to address integration. Despite the school board’s caution regarding the question of integration, even these limited intercultural efforts prompted critiques of the school board by citizens who viewed intercultural education as a form of civil rights propaganda. By the early 1960s, the struggle over segregation in the city’s schools emerged from written demands and evasions into courtroom arguments and street protests.
SCHOOL PROTESTS AND BACKLASH
In recognition of Logan’s fight against de facto segregation, the Philadelphia Tribune named him the paper’s Man of the Year for 1959. In the tribute to Logan, the paper contrasted his modest means with his accumulated research on educational discrimination:
Floyd Logan has little money. He receives no salary. He lives in an apartment and maintains himself from a small pension he receives from the Federal Government, after long years of service.… Yet, he has more information at his fingertips about the school system than most highly paid executives. His bulging files contain complete records of every step made to advance the cause of equality in public education.40
Although the school board refused to implement his demands, Logan provided the knowledge and experience on which later educational advocates would draw. Taking up Logan’s lead, by the early 1960s Philadelphia’s schools became an important target for a coalition of black civil rights activists. Like Logan, these activists pushed the school board to address de facto segregation at the city level, while they also lobbied against educational discrimination in individual neighborhood schools. Unlike Logan, this new wave of educational activists had the resources to bring litigation against the school syst
em and had a larger basis of support organized among the city’s black churches, civic groups, and neighborhoods. Moreover, unlike the Fellowship Commission’s interracial coalition building or Logan’s largely solitary work, the new educational activists increasingly looked to intra-racial mass protest techniques to secure equal educational opportunities for black students. In their protests, these community members encountered a school board that continued to deny the existence of bias, as well as increasingly vocal opposition from predominantly white sections of the city.
Logan played a supporting role on educational issues throughout the 1960s, though not entirely of his choosing. The Philadelphia branch of the NAACP, which had been an inconsistent ally on educational issues through the 1950s, began to play a more significant role in fighting school segregation.41 Logan and the NAACP worked together briefly in an attempt to force state officials to establish legal requirements to act affirmatively for integration. Logan initiated a strategy to change the state law governing school enrollment boundaries and presented his argument to the Governor’s Committee on Education in 1960. “If Pennsylvania really wants interracially integrated public schools with respects to pupils, and teachers,” Logan argued,
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