First Class

by Alison Stewart

  Hayes and Nabrit put the burden of proof on the city. Justice Frankfurter was full of questions and dominated the proceedings. He almost seemed to enjoy watching the defendants struggle.

  Milton D. Korman represented C. Melvin Sharpe and the board of education. He presented a simple case that the dual system was legitimate because Congress said so. Congress repeatedly approved budgets for a dual system. Congress passed acts to establish separate administrations. His point was that Congress had always meant the education system to be like this, dating back to the first act to establish public schools for colored children in 1862.7

  Korman and the team of Nabrit and Hayes used almost the exact information but came to very different conclusions. They cited Emancipation Day; the Acts of 1882, 1884, and 1886, which called for the school system; the 1900 consolidation of the school board administrations; and the 1906 reorganization of that school board. Korman even cited the ugly business of Anna Julia Cooper’s battle with Schools Director Hughes as an example of how Negro and white educators couldn’t get along and how each should be left to his or her own students. Korman contended that segregation was not discrimination.

  I say to the court, and I say to my distinguished adversary Mr. Hayes, that these acts were not passed, this dual school system was not set up to stamp these people with a badge of inferiority. There was not this racial feeling that he speaks of with such fervor behind these acts. There was behind these acts a kindly feeling; there was behind these acts an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted, in a place where they will not be looked up with hostility, in a place where there will be a receptive atmosphere for learning for both races without the hostility that undoubtedly Congress thought might creep into these situation. We cannot hide our faces and our minds from the fact that there is feeling between races in these United States. It is a deplorable situation. Would that it were not so. But we must face these facts.

  Face the facts and then do nothing about them because there was no need—that was this argument’s bottom line. There was no equal protection clause binding Congress.

  The last thing the justices heard from James Nabrit before the case concluded at 1:27 PM on December 11, 1953, was this:

  The basic question here is one of liberty, and under liberty, under the due process clause, you cannot deal with it as a quantum of treatment, substantially equal. You either have liberty or you do not. When liberty is interfered with by the state, it has to be justified, and you cannot justify it by saying that we only took a little liberty. You justify it by the reasonableness of the taking. We submit that in this case, in the heart of the nation’s capital, in the capital democracy, in the capital of the free world there is no place for a segregated school system. This country cannot afford it, and the Constitution does not permit it, and the statutes of Congress do not authorize it.

  The Bolling decision was announced after the four others, which is important for one reason. The justices said that if the states could desegregate, then surely the capital must. As for Nabrit’s argument about liberty, the court agreed with caution.

  Although the court has not assumed to define “Liberty” with any great precision, that term is not confined to mere freedom from bodily restraint. Liberty under law extends to the full range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue, and it cannot be restricted except for a proper governmental objective, and thus it imposes on Negro children of the District of Columbia a burden that constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of their liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause.

  Left to right: George E. C. Hayes (M Street 1911), Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit celebrate the 1954 desegregation victory.

  Library of Congress, Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos

  President Eisenhower wanted Washington to set a good example for the rest of the country when it came to integration. “A model for the nation” had been his public proclamation. Ike had laid the groundwork for the transition. In anticipation of what was to come, he’d stacked the DC Board of Commissioners, the District’s governing body, with integration-friendly men. He’d ordered the Justice Department to support the Bolling case during the Supreme Court arguments. He’d appointed Earl Warren to chief justice with full knowledge that Warren would shape the Brown decision. Eisenhower once said he believed every vestige of segregation should be erased from DC and “not a penny of federal money spent to discriminate.” However, that didn’t mean he could control racist members on the appropriations committees from ignoring pleas for more money to help the schools. The president also couldn’t directly control Washington’s board of education.

  “A model not a mockery!” was the rallying cry of Dr. Margaret Butcher, one of the three Negro members of the board at the time. The District teacher with a PhD was reacting as many Negroes did to the integration plan announced by the superintendent. On May 18, 1954, Superintendent Hobart Corning told the press he didn’t know how and when the schools would integrate, and he’d wait until the Supreme Court explained it all.8 Within a week it became clear this was not a position he could hold. Instead, he and Board President Sharpe announced a slow rollout of desegregation. A chosen block of elementary schools would integrate first, in September 1954. High schools would not begin the process until January 1955. However, there was an optional clause that angered people like Margaret Butcher. A student could stay in his or her school until graduation, even if the student was zoned out. Or if students preferred, they could transfer to schools serving the zones in which they lived.

  According to the integration guidelines as they were laid out on paper, the superintendent’s full plan would be in effect by September 1955; but with the stay-put grandfather clause, technically, the schools might not be fully desegregated until 1959. The president of the local NAACP sent a letter to the board saying that the phase-in plan would so “violate the spirit of the clear decision of the Supreme Court that its acceptance by you seems inconceivable.” Dr. Butcher and the NAACP wanted the Supreme Court’s ruling to go into effect immediately. The final vote on Corning’s step-by-step plan was 5–1, with Dr. Butcher the only member voting against it. She confronted Corning publicly in the spring of 1954.

  “I want this board to instruct Corning, regardless of cost, to sit here this summer and order his staff to rezone these schools and the students and the buildings involved this September. Mr. Corning, are you vacationing this summer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well perhaps you could appoint someone to do it for you.”

  “Mrs. Butcher, I don’t think someone could stay continuously on this job integrating and live,” Corning snapped back. But he did eventually cancel his plans. The new boundaries were decided by July, just six weeks after the decision.9

  Some called Dr. Butcher a militant—a militant with perfectly manicured, painted nails, who favored shirtwaist dresses with block-pleated skirts and three-string beaded necklaces.10 Dr. Butcher was a Dunbar graduate, and her father was one of the Ivy League-educated teachers there, the famous scientist Ernest Everett Just. She had two children in the school system and was a professor of English at Howard.

  At the beginning of the 1953–54 school year, before the Supreme Court decision was made, Dr. Butcher wanted to ensure that the board of education record reflected the disparities between what white students received and what Negro students received. Perhaps in anticipation of an unsuccessful Supreme Court outcome, she wanted everyone to tell the truth about what was happening in the schools. She wanted the word out there that the southern congressmen who were on the appropriations committees had little concern for the colored schools and that those institutions were withering. The board of education would not allow Dr. Butcher to go on the record with her concerns.11 She hounded the other board members, especially the other Negro members, to back her up. H
er efforts to do so and to demonize or oust the board members who didn’t agree with her caused some to see her as a “danger.”12 But she’d seen what not exactly benign neglect had done to the Negro schools.

  And it wasn’t a secret. The Senate and House District Appropriations Subcommittees had commissioned a report to survey the District’s schools. The extremely detailed Strayer Report found the Negro children in Washington were getting the educational crumbs. According to George Strayer and the report’s other authors, in September 1948 the average white high school teacher taught 548.1 pupil-hours per week, while black high school teachers taught 711.3 pupil-hours per week. In the 1947–48 school year, 25 percent of the white school buildings were fifty years or older as compared to 40 percent of the black school buildings. In the white grade schools, 67.9 percent of the classes had more than thirty pupils. Black schools had classes of that size or more 88.1 percent of the time. In the white grade schools, 18 percent of the classes had more than forty pupils. The corresponding figure for black schools was 40.3 percent.13

  The Negro population in Washington grew 113 percent from 1930 to 1950. The schools were either overcrowded or Negro students were shuttled into hand-me-down schools when white children vacated the old building for nicer or newer facilities. Division II (Negro schools) got Division I’s (that is, white schools’) old books. Negro students in the system at that time were not nearly as prepared as those thirty years earlier. How could they be? The average number of minutes spent in the classroom was diminishing. Some Negro children were only attending classes for three hours a day because most of the black elementary schools were on shifts to accommodate so many children. The disparity would have long-term consequences for Washington and its potential for integration.

  Even in the final weeks before the decision was due, Dr. Butcher was out looking for support. She had a big public appearance lined up for which the poster read, HEAR DYNAMIC FREEDOM’S CHAMPION, DR. MAR-CARET BUTCHER. She was the headliner at the Trinity Baptist Church program to honor the late Charles Hamilton Houston, whom she considered a personal friend, which remembered him and his fight as the world awaited the Supreme Court’s decision. The poster invited Washingtonians to “come in honor of the memory the man who gave his life that you might enjoy greater freedom.”

  Legally desegregating Washington was a complex undertaking because the Negro and white DC school systems were like a set of fraternal twins whose parents liked one better. The favored twin got the nicer things, the better room. Even in the most subtle ways, the hierarchy was displayed: Division I was the category for the white schools; Negroes were in Division II. Now the systems would have to merge and share. Up until then, there had been two sports systems, two cadet systems, two sets of teachers, and two student bodies. In the entire system there were only six jobs that bridged both systems, and they were support positions like food service and grounds maintenance.14 There were 3,588 teachers—1,895 Negro and 1,693 white. There were 108,816 students—57,716 Negro and 43,100 white. In total, 165 schools had to be realigned.15

  It would all come down to those new boundaries drawn up by all the principals using spot maps and tabulations of the pupils, block by block and grade by grade. In the summer of 1954, Washington, DC, was carved up on paper. Dr. Butcher pressed Superintendent Corning on every detail during those school board meetings during the summer of ’54.

  “Will new boundaries be fixed every year?” Dr. Butcher asked.

  “If boundaries cannot be absolutely fixed then they must be flexible for the reason that there are many changes in the population and the best use must be made of the schools,” Corning replied.

  Did the superintendent assume white flight? “I thought the board was trying to make an integrated system,” Butcher responded.

  “This is all integration,” Corning shot back.

  “I am talking about a decisive school plan whereby children will go to the schools nearest their homes and to accomplish it seems that the city should be decisively zoned,” said Dr. Butcher.

  “That is what I discussed in my report,” replied Corning.16

  On September 13, 1954, police officers were made available for street crossings and to watch traffic conditions as ninety-seven thousand students arrived at their newly desegregated schools.17 The little kids were the first. All kindergarteners and first graders entered on the basis of the new boundaries. Three thousand elementary and junior high school pupils transferred to schools nearer to their homes, relieving overcrowding. One hundred children who once traveled excessively long distances could now attend their neighborhood schools. The white and Negro technical high schools, McKinley and Armstrong, merged—as did the white and Negro teachers colleges, Wilson and Miner.18

  Washington’s transition was calm as compared to that of other cities. Yet as smoothly as the first day went for the students, the next few months were rocky. In October white high school students staged a walkout from their classes, protesting pending integration. The board of education was inundated with letters from white parents concerned about the proximity of Negro children to their own. The Capitol Hill South East Association expressed concern about “the spread of communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, venereal disease, pediculosis, scabies, and scalp ringworm.”19 Seventeen parents signed a petition that read, “We strongly protest the policy of the BOE, which results in the assignment of Negro Teachers to teach in schools which are predominately white in enrollment. It is not in our children’s best interest because of the ‘close relationship’ between teacher and pupil.”20

  Some questioned the Supreme Court’s authority. Mrs. Kate Steele wrote, “The court makes decisions, but Congress makes the laws and changes in laws such as the abolishment of segregation should be by the people or by a constitutional amendment, as the constitution does not say that the court can rule the country by force.”21 In September a Mr. Ellicot Dudding suggested that two night watchmen be placed in every school building—one white and one Negro—because he believed there was a “very bitter feeling among a vast part of the White population on the matter of integration, although I have no ill feeling toward the Negro but I heard rumors that not a school building will be left standing in Washington by Christmas.”

  By 1957, Superintendent Hobart Corning declared, “Desegregation is complete.” But he then added this: “Desegregation is the moving about of people and things. Integration is a much longer process depending on the creation of a community.”

  Those who had gone to Dunbar up until that point were selected in the sense that they were highly motivated academic students almost sequestered in an environment dedicated to their advancement. They had earned the right to be there by virtue of passing the appropriate tests and maintaining their records. For eighty-seven years, Dunbar High School had operated like a combination of a closely monitored charter school and a private college prep school. By 1954, more than sixteen thousand young men and women had graduated from the institution. The year the Supreme Court decisions came down, Dunbar sent 80 percent of its graduates to college, the highest percentage of any Washington school, white or Negro. That same year it had the highest percentage attending college on scholarship: one in four.22

  In the little picture, Dunbar was a mighty force in the District. In the bigger national picture, it was a rarity. But now that there would no longer officially be Negro or white schools, what would happen to Dunbar? What would happen to the teachers? The facility? The student body? In his parting note to the Dunbar class of 1955, the first to graduate post-segregation, the principal signaled that he knew Dunbar as a concept was ending. He wrote:

  As graduates of Dunbar High School, you inherit the mantle of thousands of sons and daughters who have preceded you. They have carried the banner high and made the name of Dunbar a noble one by their fine accomplishments all over the world. With this our proud heritage, I have no fear that you will nurture it and that it will blossom and become more fruitful as the years pass by. The opportunities are manif
old for you to add increased laurels to your Alma Mater. I have every faith that this will be done.23

  In retrospect Margaret Butcher said, “Integration—integration was the rallying cry. No one really thought about Dunbar.”24

  Dunbar, like every other school, became a neighborhood school, and attendance was based solely on the boundaries in which a child resided. From 1955 onward there would still be academically gifted students who attended Dunbar, as long as they were zoned in. But now there would also be students who had been cheated out of adequate elementary schooling. And the neighborhood around Dunbar was not great.

  “First and O Street is infamous as a gathering point for young men who are either out of school or out of employment or both out of school and employment,” reported one educator about Dunbar’s location. “They gather there and are indecent in their public conduct. I say that without reservation.”25

  Four years after DC schools were legally desegregated, Dunbar was still all Negro. In fact, that has never changed. The student body just became a more diverse academic population. The faculty changed, too. Many of the teachers moved on to other jobs once opportunities became available across the system.

  The 1959 Dunbar handbook offered a different greeting than in previous books. It reflected not only some of the changes in the new population, but also the attitude about the population entering the legendary halls of Dunbar High School. The greeting—“Dear Newcomer”—was a sign of tensions to come.