it must amend Section 1310 of the School Laws of the State by specifically regulating the wide discretionary powers of pupil assignments, including transfers [that] will not result in perpetuation of present racially segregated schools, and the creation of other all and predominantly [sic] white or Negro schools. … Also, a flexible system of districting for pupil enrollment should be devised in which representatives of the general community should be given a voice.42
Following this meeting, the Governor’s Committee on Education recommended that the state pass a “fair educational practices law … banning discrimination on account of race, color, or creed” and that it conduct a study of the school boundary lines and student transfer policies throughout the state.43 The state officials also scheduled an initial meeting with Wetter, Logan, and representatives from the Philadelphia NAACP for April 1961.
After years of the Philadelphia NAACP’s sporadic activity on the local educational front, Charles Beckett, the branch’s recently appointed education committee chairman, met with Logan several times in 1960 and 1961. As Beckett reported to his colleagues, “Years of proficient research, investigation and forthright presentation made to official bodies have provided [Floyd Logan] with a storehouse of knowledge and information invaluable to the community and state within which and for which [he] has labored so effectively.”44 The NAACP, however, was also preparing to file a lawsuit against the schools and canceled a scheduled meeting with state and local school officials because the organization felt it “would serve no purpose.”45 Logan considered the cancellation “shocking” and reminded school officials and the NAACP of his work on school issues. “In the first place, it was the Educational Equality League which made the original request for a state investigation,” Logan argued. “Hence, we do not feel that such a feeling on the part of the NAACP, justifies the cancellation of the scheduled meeting.”46 Cecil B. Moore, a lawyer and community activist who had lost the previous two elections for NAACP branch president, supported Logan’s stance:
We are anxious to have the investigation proceed as expeditiously as possible by methods which will effectively implement desegregation without regard to any position taken by the NAACP. … [W]e should proceed now as several years may elapse between the commencement and certainly successful termination of imminent litigation, whereas the practices of which we complain may continue during those years, with their attendant harmful effects on the education of a large majority of Negro pupils.47
The cancellation of the meeting delayed the start of the state’s study of school boundaries, but, more important, it created a rift between Logan and the NAACP’s leadership that limited the effectiveness of both parties.
In June 1961, the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, charging the Philadelphia Board of Education with discriminating against black students and teachers by not providing and maintaining a racially integrated school system. The NAACP brought the case, Chisholm v. Board of Public Education, on behalf of black students at Emlen elementary school in the northwest section of the city. Parents and community members in this area had raised questions for the previous five years regarding the boundary lines and student transfers that made Emlen almost all-black while the neighboring Day school was almost all-white. The case was among the first northern school desegregation cases and came just months after Taylor v. Board of Education (1961), in which a federal judge found gerrymandering of school district lines in New Rochelle, New York, to be unconstitutional. The New Rochelle case did not rule on de facto segregation, but it prompted a flurry of legal activity against school districts in the North, Midwest, and West before the Supreme Court’s decision in Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), which found evidence of unconstitutional segregation in Denver and expanded desegregation requirements outside the South.48 Leon Higginbotham, who led the Philadelphia NAACP’s legal team and was the branch president when the Chisholm suit was filed, recalled the difficulty of proving de facto segregation in a 1991 interview with Anne Phillips:
What was … insidious was that you had declarations by the school board saying that they opposed segregation … so that therefore you could not try what I call a “document case” in the traditional sense where you have what we call in evidence “a smoking gun.” … So what we tried to do is determine: How do you set up a case to demonstrate to a court that the way in which boundaries are chosen [is] not a matter of pure coincidence? … [T]here was enough if I thought that I had to go to trial as a trial lawyer that I would be able to establish and to discover questions of policy which [went] back a half-century almost, at which time there’s just no doubt that there was discrimination in the system. And, therefore, the whole argument in the northern cases would be that after you have established a prima-facie case of administrative policies, intentionally designed to preclude integration of students, that is the equivalent of [de jure segregation].49
The challenges Higginbotham and his colleagues encountered in pursuing this case were similar to those Logan had met over the previous decades; that is, they needed to extract evidence of educational discrimination from a school board that insisted it did not discriminate. Gary Orfield has shown that foes of de facto segregation in other northern and western cities faced similar barriers to litigation. “The lower courts,” Orfield argues,
would act only when the NAACP could provide incontrovertible proof of intentional, broad discrimination by school boards. Finding such evidence about the intentions of past school board members was almost impossible. Although they may have been well aware of racial patterns and of the racial implications of their zoning, site selection, transfer policy, and other decisions, they rarely discussed them in public. A clear pattern of decisions that had intensified segregation usually emerged, but they were not the kind of thing explicitly noted in the board’s minutes.50
The Philadelphia school board, which operated largely outside of public view and assiduously avoided controversy by publishing only administrative details in its minutes, proved an especially difficult target.51
Compounding this legal challenge, by the time a judge heard the case in early 1963, the NAACP’s local leadership was in flux. Higginbotham resigned in 1962 to accept an appointment to the Federal Trade Commission in the Kennedy administration. In the election to replace Higginbotham, Cecil Moore won the NAACP branch presidency thanks to his popularity in black working-class neighborhoods and his promises to take the branch in a more militant direction. In addition to Higginbotham, who was co-counsel on the case, all but one of the twenty-four lawyers working on the case pro bono left because of the controversy and political alliances within the branch.52 Due to the lingering tension over the canceled meeting, moreover, the original legal team did not take full advantage of Logan’s research materials and lacked the funds to conduct new surveys of school boundary, student transfer, and teacher placement policies. One of the outgoing members of the legal team, William Lee Akers, wrote to Moore regarding the challenges this case presented. “I do not believe that any lawyer who has a day to day practice or employment can do justice to the case,” he wrote. “I would be pleased to continue to assist in this case but am firmly resolved that I will not go to the poorhouse by attempting to carry this monster on my own shoulders. … This is most unfortunate and is not what the case and the Association deserve, but I have no choice.”53 By spring 1963, Isaiah Crippens was the only attorney remaining on the case. Without a team to conduct the necessary research, Crippens agreed to wait until two committees on school segregation appointed by the school board filed their reports.54
If the NAACP’s traditional legal approach to educational discrimination was threatened by branch politics and a lack of funds, it was also increasingly out of step with the mass protest strategies favored by black leaders and community members frustrated by the persistent inequality in the city’s schools. Cecil Moore, the newly elected NAACP branch president, became the most prominent
of these local protest leaders. As historian Matthew Countryman describes, Moore positioned himself “as a local version of Malcolm X, the only black leader in the city unwilling to censor his words and actions to conform to white liberal sensibilities.”55 Moore helped build this reputation by organizing a picket at a junior high school construction site in the predominantly black Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia. The protest was a continuation of more than a month of protests over labor discrimination at city-sponsored construction projects, and started just days after Moore and the Philadelphia NAACP organized a rally at City Hall to support the civil rights demonstrators who were attacked in Birmingham, Alabama.56
The pickets at Strawberry Mansion Junior High linked employment discrimination in school construction with the issues of school segregation and school-sponsored apprenticeship programs that discriminated against blacks. Like the schools’ site selections for Northeast High School and Franklin High School, the Strawberry Mansion site ensured that the school would be segregated as soon as it opened. That the skilled union workers building the school were almost exclusively white was largely a result of the exclusion of black students from apprenticeship classes. These classes used public school space and resources to train future union workers. The unions selected the students who could participate in the classes, and first preference was usually given to sons and nephews of union members. In other cases, ethnic associations and neighborhood churches and clubs provided apprentices for larger unions. In almost all cases, the family and social networks that fed these apprenticeship programs excluded blacks from the building trades.57 To protest these conditions, the NAACP began picketing the school site on May 24. Small groups of protesters arrived at the construction site every morning, and they were joined each afternoon by teenagers and blue-collar workers who came from their schools and work sites, respectively. As they walked around the entrance to the construction site, protestors shouted, “The only thing we did wrong was to let segregation stay so long.”58 Taking up the theme of this protest chant, the Philadelphia Tribune’s editorial page noted that although a state law prohibiting discrimination in school construction was passed fourteen years earlier, “There was no effort made by anyone to enforce it, despite the fact that it is generally agreed that there has been and continued to be discrimination against Negro skilled labor.”59 Among the hundreds of picketers were black laborers assigned to work on the school site who refused to cross the picket line. “This is a false democracy when qualified colored people can’t get a job building schools for their own kids,” one worker told the Tribune.60 This combination of employment discrimination against adults and educational discrimination against young people motivated protestors to stay on the picket line for a week.
After the fifth and most violent day of clashes between protestors and police, the school board and construction leaders agreed to the NAACP’s demand that five black skilled workers be hired at the site and that a joint monitoring committee be appointed to increase black employment in skilled trades. In negotiations prompted by the protests, the school board also agreed to close apprenticeship programs that excluded black students. At the time, the Strawberry Mansion pickets were the largest mass protest against educational discrimination in the city’s history. Although they did not force the school board to take action to address school segregation, the protests provided black leaders with another strategy to use against the school board’s delays. “The old procedures of quiet protest have been abandoned for open demonstration,” the Tribune declared in an editorial on the importance of education to civil rights.61 The threat of protests, and media coverage of these protests, became a key tool as Moore and other black activists continued to fight the school board through the summer of 1963.
In addition to these mass protests, Moore and the NAACP continued to pursue a legal victory over school segregation in the Chisholm case. Judge Harold Wood set September 15, 1963, as the date by which the schools and the NAACP would have to come to an agreement to avoid going to trial. The school’s nondiscrimination committee had prepared a plan for desegregation in advance of the deadline, but Walter Biddle Saul, a former school board president and the school board’s counsel for the Chisholm lawsuit, refused to file the document with the court. Filing a plan for desegregation, Saul argued, would constitute an admission that the school segregation existed, which he insisted was not the case.62 In response, Moore and the 400 Ministers, a group of clergy who led a successful selective patronage campaign against local companies with discriminatory hiring practices, threatened to organize direct action protests and student boycotts if the board did not adopt an acceptable policy.63
The tension between these activists and the school board increased when Judge Wood ordered the board to adopt a desegregation plan that included changes in school feeder patterns to further integration. Wood also granted a continuance in the case, meaning that it would not go to trial as long as both parties submitted a progress report every six months. The Tribune portrayed this decision as an unmitigated victory, declaring: “Parents of children across the city raised their voices in a chorus of ‘hallelujahs,’ as the Board of Education accepted unconditionally the demands of the NAACP for a desegregated school system.”64 The desegregation plan included reviews of school boundaries and school building programs and agreements that the board would modify its boundary policies and building site selection to foster desegregation. In total, the plan committed the school board to take many of the affirmative steps toward integration long encouraged by educational advocates.
Rather than overturning de facto segregation, however, the judge’s order sparked another round of delays by the school board, protests by civil rights advocates, and counterprotests by segregationist antibusing groups. In the first protest following the order, black parents joined Moore and the NAACP in pickets at Meade Elementary School in North Philadelphia after the principal announced plans to address overcrowding by busing students to another segregated school. In addition to the school protests, the NAACP led pickets at the Board of Education building, the home of the school principal, and the homes of superintendent Wetter and Robert Poindexter, one of two black members of the school board. Moore promised to keep the pickets going until students at the overcrowded school could transfer to an integrated school. “We’ve learned that you can’t believe what the Board says it’s going to do,” Moore told the Tribune.65 After a student boycott kept half the students out of classes for one day, Moore successfully negotiated the transfer with school officials.66 Building on this victory, Moore warned that the school board would face larger protests if it continued to delay desegregation efforts: “Be it in the courts, the streets, or the ballot box, the NAACP will integrate the schools. If they’re going to be stubborn, we’ll show them that what we accomplished at the Meade School and at 31st and Dauphin sts. [Strawberry Mansion Junior High construction site] was only a petty example of what they can expect in the future.”67 As the school board filed progress reports that retreated from its earlier desegregation plans, these mass protest tactics became increasingly important to civil rights advocates.
The struggle over school desegregation in Philadelphia peaked in 1964. As required by the continuance in the Chisholm case, the school board filed a progress report in January announcing plans for limited student busing. A second report in April laid out plans to realign the boundaries of half of the city’s elementary schools.68 In both cases, the plans were designed to relieve overcrowding first and secondarily to foster integration. The plans drew criticism from both civil rights advocates and antibusing groups. Isaiah Crippens, the NAACP’s attorney in the Chisholm case, dismissed the first report as a “public relations gimmick, a hoax, a linguistic swindle.”69 Many black parents also doubted the school board’s intentions and, with the assistance of Moore and the NAACP, protested boundaries and overcrowding at two schools.70
The school board’s reports also prompted parents in several predominately white neighborhoods
to form groups to oppose the proposed busing and boundary changes. Speaking at meetings throughout the city, Joseph Frieri, the leader of the Parents’ and Taxpayers’ Association of Philadelphia, the largest of these antibusing groups, argued for the importance of neighborhood schools. Rather than busing or boundary changes, Frieri argued, the schools should focus on remedial training for low-income black children whom, he claimed, were culturally deprived. Members of another antibusing group dramatized Frieri’s concerns by carrying a coffin symbolizing the death of the neighborhood school into a school committee meeting.71 Mayor James Tate and City Council President Paul D’Ortona joined these parents in attacking the school board’s plan for limited busing. D’Ortona claimed that busing would increase juvenile delinquency and leave students “prey to moral offenders.” D’Ortona also toured white sections of the city delivering these arguments and urged white citizens to “storm City Hall” to defend neighborhood schools.72
In supporting segregation by sounding warnings about culturally deprived and delinquent black youth, these antibusing leaders identified black students as the problem with Philadelphia’s schools. This line of argument built on a magazine article, published earlier that year, that attacked Philadelphia public schools and black students. Published in Greater Philadelphia Magazine, a magazine marketed to members of the Philadelphia business community, “Crisis in the Classroom” claimed to be an inside report on the Philadelphia school system. Greater Philadelphia Magazine reporter Gaeton Fonzi worked for just six days as a substitute teacher and spent a month talking with administrators and teachers. Fonzi’s statement of concern for the state of education in Philadelphia’s schools fixed blame on unprepared, unruly, and violent black youth. The teachers of these students, he argued, were “living a professional lie, refusing to admit, even to themselves, that what they face daily is the impossible task of trying to reach human beings who don’t want to be reached.” In Fonzi’s view, “culturally deprived” black students were synonymous with the public schools, and were at the root of the schools’ problems. “The great bulk of the Philadelphia public school system is composed of an economically deprived, socially-suppressed class of adolescent who has been environmentally conditioned to a life that is without hope or ambition,” Fonzi wrote. He continued:
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