1947 June 6

Gary, Indiana, Schools to End Racial Segregation

 

The School Board of the Gary, Indiana, announced on this day that, beginning the following fall, it would assign all public school students to their “proper” school, without regard to race, color or religion.

Most African-American students in the district had been attending the all-African-American Roosevelt High School. The Emerson School had been all-white since 1927, when white students organized a strike to protest the enrollment of 18 African-American students. Only the Froebel School in the district was racially integrated, but it had been the scene of a white-student strike in early 1946, in protest of the initial enrollment of African-American students.

The decision by the Gary School Board on this day indicated that even in the mid-1940s deliberate racial segregation existed in some northern cities.

After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional, northern schools had de facto segregated schools, largely because of racially segregated housing patterns in which “white flight” to the suburbs by white families left inner city schools with largely African American students. See the boycott of the Chicago public schools on October 22, 1965 in protest of de facto segregation.

Learn more: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001)

Read about the history of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision: Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (1975)

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

 

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