Brown of the North

The NAACP once thought Philadelphia was ripe for a legal case to attack Northern school segregation.

by Dale Mezzacappa

After the historic 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education started dismantling Jim Crow, leaders of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund looked for a strong case that could attack school segregation in the North.

It was a tall order. In non-Jim Crow states, separate schools were not codified in statute. So the legal case was murkier, even though discrimination was as pervasive and the results - segregated schools - as real.

Philadelphia, with a history of racism and an African American legal elite, was the perfect place to give it a try.

The resulting case, Chisholm v. the Board of Public Education, was filed in 1961 with NAACP chapter president A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. as lead attorney. Initially, it looked promising, and the national NAACP considered putting money into pursuing it.

But rather than a precedent-setter, Chisholm became a footnote. It fell victim to NAACP politics, official stonewalling, and the sheer difficulty in proving that the mostly White Board of Education deliberately discriminated against Blacks when it publicly insisted otherwise.

At best, Chisholm paved the way for the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission's lawsuit against the District, which continues to this day.

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In the early 20th century, Philadelphia had a higher percentage of Blacks in its public schools than any other big city. And the proportion grew steadily - from 5.3 percent in 1910 to 47 percent in 1960.

In part, this was because the city has long housed two separate systems. In 1960, the heyday of urban Catholicism, 52 percent of White children went to parochial schools, but just 8 percent of Black students did.

But the public schools were also segregated, because officials simply ignored the 1881 state law outlawing discrimination in education. In 1908, School Superintendent Martin Brumbaugh created several all-Black elementary schools to employ Black teachers, who were prohibited from teaching White students. Brumbaugh, who later became governor, had also concluded that Black students were unfit to learn an academic curriculum.

"The difference between Philadelphia and the Southern states," said V.P. Franklin, a historian who wrote a book called The Education of Black Philadelphia, "is that since it was against the law . . . to segregate students, they segregated the teachers. So a form of de jure segregation was maintained."

The Black community was split. Black teachers endorsed the segregated schools because they feared losing their jobs and felt that they were better suited to teach Black children than White teachers, who generally had little confidence in the abilities of African Americans.

But others fought against segregation, most prominently Philadelphia Tribune editor E. Washington Rhodes and Floyd Logan, an IRS accountant who through his Education Equality League battled it for 50 years.

They were joined by the NAACP, which brought its first petition against segregation to the school board in 1922.

But change came slowly. It was 1935 before the Philadelphia school board assigned a Black teacher to a secondary school - just one; the next didn't come until 1940. In the mid-1950s, a report found that 83 percent of the District's Black teachers were in schools that were at least 80 percent Black.

But the teacher policy was only one piece of the pattern of discrimination. In the 1950s, the Board of Education built many new schools for Whites who were moving to the expanding Northeast. But when schools in Black neighborhoods started bursting at the seams with the second great migration from the South, the board put portable classrooms in the school yards, often staffing them with unqualified substitutes. Black students in crowded schools were often on part-time schedules, while White students got transfers elsewhere. And according to accounts from students and teachers of the time, predominantly Black high schools lacked sports equipment or rigorous courses, which disappeared with the White students.