Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons Honors Projects Student Scholarship and Creative Work 2021 Promises Unfulfilled: Integration and Segregation in Metropolitan Philadelphia Public Schools, 1954-2009 Nina Nayiri McKay Bowdoin College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation McKay, Nina Nayiri, "Promises Unfulfilled: Integration and Segregation in Metropolitan Philadelphia Public Schools, 1954-2009" (2021). Honors Projects. 245. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects/245 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship and Creative Work at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Promises Unfulfilled: Integration and Segregation in Metropolitan Philadelphia Public Schools, 1954-2009 An Honors Paper for the Department of History By Nina Nayiri McKay Bowdoin College, 2021 ©2021 Nina Nayiri McKay 2 McKay Introduction In the mainstream historical narrative about school segregation in the United States, Philadelphia is rarely mentioned. Sandwiched between the nation’s largest city, New York, and its capital, Washington, DC., Philadelphia is often left in the shadows of its better-known mid- Atlantic neighbors. The city also did not garner national attention during the era of school desegregation; it was not the site of a court case that made it past the state level, and it did not see mass protests by segregationists of the kind that made fellow northern city Boston a national symbol of resistance to integration. But Philadelphia was home to one of the most persistent, long-lasting efforts at school integration in any city across the country. Unlike most desegregation cases, which were argued in federal courts, nearly all desegregation litigation for Philadelphia’s schools took place in state courts. This was a unique example of pro-integration liberals carving out alternative avenues for desegregation in the North after a shift in the national political climate, Supreme Court nominations, and legal roadblocks all but foreclosed the possibility of Northern integration through federal courts. But these liberals were up against a metropolitan landscape that was unequal by design and was growing more segregated by race and socioeconomic status every year. Suburban silence, fatigue, and a lack of resources would combine with logistical, legal, and political roadblocks to pose hurdle after hurdle for integration advocates to clear, leading to a decades-long tug-of-war that continued into the twenty-first century. Philadelphia’s story fits into a growing body of scholarship connecting different metropolitan histories to national trends in discrimination, segregation, and integration. Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism shows how suburban 3 McKay secession in metropolitan Atlanta was not only a Southern phenomenon; rather, it was part of the rise of a nation-wide conservative movement that had at its core the desire to preserve whites- only spaces. In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein explains how structural racism stood at the heart of post-war administrative practices. He writes about multiple U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, demonstrating that the discriminatory impacts of agencies such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Department of Veterans Affairs played a role in shaping every American metropolitan landscape. In The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation, Joyce Baugh focuses on how the American legal system enables a combination of local and national forces to create concrete barriers to integration for every American city. Baugh’s work demonstrates that racism and segregation in the North can have just as much nation-wide impact as they can in the South, contributing to another developing body of scholarship: segregation, civil rights, and Black Power in the North. As Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis write in the introduction to The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South, the North merits close study because “northerners wove Jim Crow racism into the fabric of their social, political, and economic life in ways that shaped the history of the region, and the entire nation.”1 Thomas Sugrue explores this in Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, which includes a discussion of how white flight and suburbanization mapped onto pre-existing structural inequality. In their article, “Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal,” Eric Avila and Mark Rose explain how 1 Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, introduction to The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North, ed. Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 3. 4 McKay these forces led to a problem of “racialized poverty,” wherein Black communities in urban areas bore the combined effects of racism and classism. The national phenomenon of metropolitan separation by race following World War II has contributed to the existence of a body of scholarship that takes a metropolitan approach to understanding integration, segregation, and discrimination. These works demonstrate how the existence of predominantly-white suburban communities is inextricably linked to racialized poverty in urban areas, preventing white flight from excusing suburban communities from reckoning with the history of racial inequality in the United States. In Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits, Ansley Erickson examines school integration and segregation in metropolitan Nashville through this lens, demonstrating how suburban secession and social capital could prevent meaningful, long-lasting integration even when city and suburbs were part of the same school district. In Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism, Brett Gadsden applies a metropolitan lens to a study of school integration in Delaware, demonstrating how Delaware’s status as a border state challenges North/South and de jure/de facto binaries. Gadsden writes that his work offers “an alternative approach to the problem of place through a view of U.S. sectionalism as socially and politically constructed and a powerful narrative framework with which historians and historical actors have assessed the legitimacy of different forms of racial segregation.”2 This is a helpful way to understand segregation in Philadelphia, which had roots in legally sanctioned practices but is often incorrectly understood as having occurred out of personal choice. Indeed, 2 Brett Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11 5 McKay Michael Savage’s work on desegregation efforts in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Boston, helps demonstrate how Northern boundaries created and maintained segregation. There is not a large body of scholarship focused on the history of civil rights, discrimination, segregation, and integration in Philadelphia, but there are a few significant works. Matthew Delmont focuses on youth roles in the Civil Rights Movement in The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock’n’Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. Delmont’s analysis provides a clear connection between housing discrimination and school segregation. He writes that early efforts at Philadelphia school desegregation were “overwhelmed” by “discriminatory housing policies that produced residential segregation and the school board’s refusal to admit that its school construction, zoning, and transfer policies contributed to segregation.”3 In Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, Matthew Countryman picks up where Delmont left off chronologically, charting a turning point amongst Black communities in Philadelphia when many began to focus away from failed integration initiatives and toward community control. In her article, “A History of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Philadelphia, 1955-1967,” Anne Phillips covers this same period, focusing on activism and federal litigation in the years before Philadelphia’s integration cases took place exclusively in state courts. Philadelphia’s state litigation—the HRC cases—has not been widely studied. But Malik Morrison’s article, “An Examination of Philadelphia’s School Desegregation Litigation,” and Stephen Nelson and Alison Tyler’s article, “Examining Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission v. School District of Philadelphia: Considering How the Supreme Court’s Waning Support of School Desegregation Affected Desegregation Efforts Based on State Law,” help 3 Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 100. 6 McKay anchor the HRC cases in local and national contexts, respectively. However, no work has been done that connects Philadelphia’s post-war metropolitan formation, initial efforts at school desegregation, federal litigation, and state litigation into one historical narrative. In addition, there has not been scholarly work on how a historical analysis of integration and segregation in Philadelphia metropolitan-area schools can inform today’s