White Girl Expelled from Segregated All-Black Washington, DC, School
Karla Rosel Galarza, age 22, was expelled from a Washington, DC, vocational high school because she is white, it was reported on this day.
Galarza had enrolled in the all-black Margaret Murray Vocational High School in February so she could take a course in dress designing, which she claimed was not available in other schools. When the District of Columbia Board of Education learned of her situation, it ordered her to transfer to the all-white Burdick Vocational High School, claiming that a dress designing class was taught there. Galarza claimed this was not true.
Washington, DC, was a racially segregated city in the 1940s, and desegregation did not begin –slowly– until the 1950s. Two members of the Board of Education were African-Americans and voted with the white members to order Galarza to be removed from Murray Vocational High School. They stated that they voted against their principles but because the law required segregated schools.
Galarza stated that she planned to challenged the District’s segregated school system in court.
In his first State of the Union address in January 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower promised to end racial segregation in Washington, DC, schools. In the decision of District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Restaurants, a court ruled that racial segregation in the district was unconstitutional. A year later, in Bolling v. Sharpe, on the same day as the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared the segregated District of Columbia public schools were unconstitutional.
In one of the most important decisions in the history of the court, the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954 declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Tragically, the decision did not end race discrimination in public schools. In southern states, many white parents created private schools for their children. In the rest of the country, the movement of white parents to suburban communities with separate school districts, along with private schools, left most city schools racially segregated.
Read the definitive book on the epic struggle for the 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 (2004)
Find statistics on the racial and ethnic demographics of public schools today at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
Learn more: Harry Jaffe, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington (1994)
Take the civil rights history tour of Washington, DC: http://washington.org/dc-itinerary/dc-itinerary-major-civil-rights-sites-1-day
Learn more about the civil rights history of Washington, DC: http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/civil-rights-movement/essays/local-and-national-story-civil-rights-movement-postwar-w
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here