Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  52. “Conference of Educational Equality League and Supporting Organization with Members of Board of Public Education in Executive Session,” June 10, 1952, FL collection, Acc 469, box 1, folder 4, TUUA. Throughout the 1950s, Logan coupled his praise for democratic education with anticommunist rhetoric. On the anticommunist rhetoric of many civil rights activists during this period, see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  53. “Conference of Educational Equality League and Supporting Organization with Members of Board of Public Education in Executive Session.” On the materials the EEL presented to the school board, see “Suggestions for Policy on Democratization of Philadelphia Public Schools,” June 10, 1952, FL collection, Acc 469, box 1, folder 4, TUUA; “Some Pertinent Facts about Philadelphia Schools” [n.d.], [ca. October 1951], FL collection, Acc 469, box 8, folder 27, TUUA; “History Highlights: Educational Equality League: 1932–1960.”

  54. “Conference Report: Meeting with Walter Biddle Saul” [n.d.], [ca. October 4, 1952], FL collection, Acc 469, box 4, folder 30, TUUA. For examples of the school boundary information on which Logan based his claims about racial gerrymandering, see Louis Hayer, letter to Floyd Logan, February 19, 1952, FL collection, Acc 469, box 26, folder 8, TUUA.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Ibid.

  57. “School Board Denies Charge of Jim-Crow,” Philadelphia Tribune, July

  58. “Report: Review of Meetings with Board,” July 9, 1953, FL collection, Acc 469, box 1, folder 4, TUUA.

  59. “Report: Educational Policies Special Committee,” June 24, 1953, FL collection, Acc 469, box 19, folder 1, TUUA.

  60. Floyd Logan, letter to Mrs. John Frederick Lewis, September 19, 1953, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 13, TUUA.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Gary Orfield, “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, Gary Orfield, Susan Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: The New Press, 1996), 312–13. On the adoption of the de facto explanation of residential segregation, see Lipsitz, “Getting around Brown,” 51–54.

  63. Jeanne Theoharis, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Civil Rights Movement outside the South,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49–73; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 246–48; Kathryn Necker-man, School Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 81–106; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 194–96; Adina Back, “Up South in New York: The 1950s School Desegregation Struggles” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997).

  64. See, for example, “Conference Report: Meeting with Walter Biddle Saul” [n.d.]; “School Board Denies Charge of Jim-Crow;” “Report: Review of Meetings with Board;” “Report: Educational Policies Special Committee.”

  65. David L. Ullman, memo to Members of Fellowship Commission Executive Committee, December 31, 1952, JCRC collection, box 007, folder 006, PJAC; “Fellowship Commission Fair Educational Opportunities Committee minutes,” February 6, 1953, FL collection, Acc 469, box 37, folder 24, TUUA.

  66. David Ullman, memo to Members of Fellowship Commission Executive Committee, April 22, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 16, folder 318, TUUA. On the educational issues addressed by the Fellowship Commission, see “Fellowship Commission Fair Educational Opportunities Committee Minutes 1953–56,” JCRC collection, box 007, folders 005–006, PJAC.

  67. Maurice Fagan, letter to Clarence E. Pickett and Leon J. Obermayer, September 16, 1955, FC collection, Acc 626, box 57, folder 13, TUUA.

  68. Michael Clapper, “School Design, Site Selection, and the Political Geography of Race in Postwar Philadelphia,” Journal of Planning History 5 (August 2006): 247–49.

  69. CHR, “Philadelphia’s Negro Population: Facts on Housing.”

  70. Charles Neville, “Origin and Development of the Public High School in Philadelphia,” The School Review 35, no. 5 (May 1927): 367–68. On the history of Central High School of Philadelphia, see David Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

  71. The Alumni Association of Northeast High School, “75th Anniversary Record,” 1965, Northeast High School file, Philadelphia School District Archives (PSDA).

  72. Robert Wayne Clark, “To the Young Men of Edison,” http://www.philsch.k12.pa.us/schools/edison/hstclark.html (accessed October 1, 2006); Helen Oakes, “The Oakes Newsletter,” December 14, 1973, Thomas Edison High School file, PSDA. On the importance of alumni to the school, see “Northeast High Parents, Alumni Library Drive,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 22, 1960.

  73. Fellowship Commission, “Summary Statement of the Northeast,” December 6, 1957, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 2, folder 33, TUUA;

  74. David McAllister, “Between the Suburbs and the Ghetto: Racial and Economic Change in Philadelphia, 1933–1985” (Ph.D. diss, Temple University, 2006), 160–61.

  75. Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 59.

  76. Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 226–27, 247–48.

  77. “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. On the intercultural education program implemented at Northeast High School, see “Intergroup Education, Northeast High School,” 1960–61, Northeast High School file, PSDA.

  78. On the construction of the new Northeast High School, see “Northeast High Opens Monday,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 7, 1957; George Riley, “Northeast to Open as City’s Newest Public High School,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, February 10, 1957; “Noted Alumni Attend Rites at New Northeast High,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 1957; “New School Buildings Provide for Growing City’s Needs,” School News and Views, February 28, 1957, Northeast High School files, PSDA; “New Northeast High School Occupies 43-Acre Site,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 1, 1957; Harrison Fry, “Northeast High Will Dedicate New School,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, April 28, 1957; “All-Day Program to Dedicate New Northeast High May 1,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, April 14, 1957. On the new schools being built in the 1950s in the suburban Delaware Valley, see “New Schools for Newcomers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 24, 1957; Peter Binzen, “Cheltenham Twp. Prepares to Open $6,390,000 High School and Pool,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 17, 1959; Clapper, “School Design, Site Selection, and the Political Geography of Race in Postwar Philadelphia,” 247.

  79. Robert Wayne Clark, “To the Young Men of Edison.”

  80. The Alumni Association of Northeast High School, “75th Anniversary Record.”

  81. Blaustein, Civil Rights U.S.A., 138.

  82. For examples of Logan’s correspondence with Superintendent Allen Wetter and Business Manager Add Anderson, see “Notes on telephone conversation with Add Anderson,” May 29, 1958, FL collection, Acc 469, box 8, folder 7, TUUA; “Notes on telephone conversation with Allen Wetter,” June 7, 1958, FL collection, Acc 469, box 8, folder 7, TUUA.

  83. 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 23, folder 6, TUUA; “Number of Negro Teachers and Percentage of N
egro Students in Philadelphia Senior High Schools, 1956–1957” [n.d.], FL collection, Acc 469, box 14, folder 10, TUUA.

  84. On the curriculum options at Edison High School, see Robert Wayne Clark, “The Occupational Practice Shop,” Clearing House Magazine, April 1961, Urban League (UL) collection, URB 1, box 9, folder 145, TUUA; Philadelphia Advisory Council for Vocational Education, “Minutes of Meeting,” April 25, 1961, UL collection, URB 1, box 9, folder 145, TUUA.

  85. “Educational League Wins Fight for New Franklin High,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 8, 1955; Floyd Logan, letter to Allen Wetter, September 19, 1956, FL collection, Acc 469, box 9, folder 2, TUUA.

  86. In the late 1950s, the Reverend Leon Sullivan organized an employment agency for black teenagers in his North Philadelphia neighborhood. In the early 1960s, he was a leader among the four hundred ministers who organized several successful selective patronage campaigns against private employers to improve job opportunities for black workers. Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 83–119.

  87. “Meeting Minutes: Conference with the Board of Superintendents and District Superintendents,” September 21, 1959, FL collection, Acc 439, box 9, folder 2, TUUA.

  88. Floyd Logan, letter to Dr. Carl Seifert, December 3, 1957, FL collection, Acc 469, box 11, folder 6, TUUA; Floyd Logan, “Petition to Members of the Board of Public Education,” [n.d.] [ca. 1957], FL collection, Acc 469, box 6, folder 27, TUUA; Floyd Logan, “Script for WDAS Radio Discussion of Integration in the Philadelphia Public Schools,” FL collection, Acc 469, box 9, folder 22, TUUA.

  89. William Odell, “Educational Survey Report for the Philadelphia Board of Public Education,” February 1965, PSDA; School District of Philadelphia Curriculum Report, May 1963 cited in Helen Oakes, “The School District of Philadelphia” [n.d.] [ca. 1968], FL collection, Acc 469, box 24, folder 33, TUUA. For Logan’s work on behalf of parents whose children were tracked into lower-level courses based on IQ scores, see FL collection, Acc 469, box 8, folder 12, TUUA.

  90. Floyd Logan, letter to Allen Wetter, February 19, 1960, FL collection, Acc 469, box 9, folder 2, TUUA.

  91. Peter Binzen, “Class at Franklin High Drops from 151 to 21 in 3 Years,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 10, 1961. On the Philadelphia school board’s construction program in these years, see Clapper, “School Design, Site Selection, and the Political Geography of Race in Postwar Philadelphia.”

  92. “Their Three Best Years,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 14, 1961.

  93. Floyd Logan, letter to Allen Wetter, March 8, 1961, FL collection, Acc 469, box 9, folder 2, TUUA.

  94. Allen Wetter, letter to Elias Wolf, January 30, 1961, box 34, “Greater Philadelphia Movement” folder, PSDA.

  95. Oakes, Keeping Track, 173.

  96. James Conant, The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); James Conant, Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961).

  97. Stephen Preskill, “Raking from the Rubbish: Charles W. Eliot, James B. Conant, and the Public Schools” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1984), 280–82.

  98. On the “great debate” regarding education in the United States in the cold war era and the influence of Conant’s reports, see David Gamson, “From Progressivism to Federalism: The Pursuit of Equal Educational Opportunity, 1915–1965,” in To Educate a Nation: Federal and National Strategies of School Reform, ed. Carl Kaestle and Alyssa Lodewick (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 177–201; Steven Tozer, Paul Violas, and Guy Senese, School and Society: Educational Practice as Social Expression (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 24–33, 187–211; and Preskill, “Raking from the Rubbish,” 264–317.

  99. Conant, Slums and Suburbs, 31.

  100. Ibid., 7, 145–47.

  101. Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, 152.

  102. On the influence of cultural deprivation research on educational policies and practices, see James Banks, “Multicultural Education: Historical Development, Dimensions, and Practice,” Review of Research in Education, 19 (1993): 28–30; Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, 145–81; Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2005).

  103. Riessman’s reference to “one in three” young people being culturally deprived was influenced by the Ford Foundation’s Great Cities School Improvement Studies, published in 1960. Frank Riessman, The Culturally Deprived Child (New York: Harper, 1962), 9.

  104. Ibid., 8, 80.

  105. Ibid., 1–9. On the influence of Riessman’s book, see Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, 154–60.

  106. Philadelphia School Board, “The Story of the Philadelphia Public Schools in 1962 and in a Few Prior Years, with, Here and There, a Comment about the Future,” October 1, 1962, FL collection, Acc 469, box 25, folder 14, TUUA.

  107. Wetter, “For Every Child: The Story of Integration in the Philadelphia Public Schools.” For Logan’s critique of Wetter’s position on integration, see “Dr. Wetter Hit for Stand on Mixing Schools,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 21, 1960; Floyd Logan, letter to Members of Board of Public Education, November 23, 1960, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 20, TUUA.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Jeanne Theoharis, “Introduction” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2.

  2. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), xiv.

  3. “Urge State Action on School Bias,” Philadelphia Tribune, June 1, 1954; Floyd Logan, letter to Governor John Fine, May 19, 1954, FL collection, Acc 469, box 3, folder 22, TUUA. On Logan’s attempts to promote integration in Philadelphia in the wake of Brown, see Floyd Logan, letter to Mercedes and William Dodds, May 18, 1955, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 14, TUUA.

  4. On the importance of information networks to civil rights, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 541. For examples of Floyd Logan’s raising the profile of school segregation in Philadelphia through the Philadelphia Tribune, see “Desegregation in School,” Philadelphia Tribune, September 18, 1954; “School Board Asked to Redistrict for Full Integration,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 8, 1955; “Gov. Leader to Submit Logan School Plan to Commission,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 7, 1955; “Separate Schools in Penna.,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 17, 1955; “Fate of Integration in Local Courts,” Philadelphia Tribune, June 4, 1955; “Logan Sparks Drive to Learn Extent of School Bias in Pa.,” Philadelphia Tribune, November 24, 1956; “Race Segregation in Pennsylvania Schools Appears Doomed,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 26, 1957; Floyd Logan, letter to John Saunders, [n.d.] [ca. 1956], FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 14, TUUA; Floyd Logan, letter to Eustace Gay, July 21, 1956, FL collection, Acc 469, box 4, folder 9, TUUA. For examples of Floyd Logan’s efforts to make Philadelphia’s school segregation a story in the mainstream press, see Floyd Logan, letter to Frank Ford, August 30, 1957, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 15, TUUA; Floyd Logan, letter to Editor of Evening Bulletin, September 7, 1957, FL collection, Acc 469, box 10, folder 4, TUUA; Floyd Logan, letter to Adam Clayton Powell, January 24, 1956, FL collection, Acc 469, box 2, folder 14, TUUA; Floyd Logan, letter to Editor of Look Magazine, June 23, 1956, FL collection, Acc 469, box 4, folder 9, TUUA.

  5. For examples of the coverage of Little Rock in the mainstream Philadelphia newspapers, see Robert Roth, “U.S. Probes Arkansas’ Use of Troops to Bar Integration; President Criticises [sic] Governor,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 3, 1957; “Guardsmen Bar Negroes from Arkansas School,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 4, 1957; “Hate for Elizabeth,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 6, 1957; “Faubus Warns against Force; Negroes Ejected at 2d School,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,
September 9, 1957; “Eisenhower Warns He’ll Use Troops if Little Rock Terror Continues,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 24, 1957; “1000 Troops Ring Little Rock School; Fighting ‘Anarchy,’ Eisenhower Says,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 1957; “Bayonets Impose Arkansas Peace,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 26, 1957; “9 in School, All Quiet in Little Rock,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 27, 1957; “Eisenhower Rejects Pledge by Faubus as Insufficient; Little Rock Troops to Stay,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2, 1957; “President, Faubus Locked in Troop Removal Impasse; Little Rock Pupils Harass 9,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1957; “Little Rock ‘Walkout’ Fails, Guards Bar Rowdy Pupils; President Hits Faubus’ Acts,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1957.

  6. For examples of the coverage of southern school segregation fights outside of Little Rock in the mainstream Philadelphia newspapers, see “Two Sisters Barred from High School in Virginia,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 5, 1957; “Score of Men Attack Minister Leading Children into Alabama School,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 9, 1957; “Dynamiters Wreck Nashville Schools,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 10, 1957; Thomas Stokes, “Demonstrations in South Painting Ugly Picture of U.S.,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 11, 1957; Payton Gray Sr., “Blame Arkansas for Riots Here: School Authorities Acting to Prevent Mass Panic in City,” Philadelphia Tribune, October 1, 1957.

  7. “Exclusive! (WCAU advertisement),” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 11, 1957.

  8. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 679.

  9. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 223.

  10. On television news coverage of the civil rights movement, see Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 135; Julian Bond, “The Media and the Movement” in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed. Brian Ward (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 16–40; University of Virginia Center for Digital History “Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950–1970,” http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv/ (accessed November 15, 2007).