School Desegregation
In 1949, five years before Brown v. Bd. of Education, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law desegregating Indiana’s schools. The Indianapolis Public Schools had been formally segregated since 1927 when a Klan dominated school board drew dual elementary school boundaries and Crispus Attucks high school was constructed. Protests against segregation gained momentum after World War II. Indianapolis was the largest city in the North with a segregated school system. (Indiana being the “middle-finger of the South thrust up into the north.”) Gary and Elkhart announced firm plans to desegregate, but IPS was standing firm. A desegregation bill was introduced in the legislature in 1947, with the support of the NAACP, labor groups, the Indiana Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Indianapolis Press. The IPS board was opposed, saying it would be too disruptive to their current allocation of resources to various schools and faculty. There was also some talk of respecting “current local practices in race relations.” The desegregation bill failed that year.
The campaign to integrate schools continued after the 1947 General Assembly. The NAACP threatened an injunctive law suit to force integration. Some black students had been transferred to School 32, ostensibly because the black schools those students would have gone to lacked the capacity. A number of white parents kept their kids out of school protesting that their kids were being used as “guinea pigs” for the integration movement. The IPS board was ambivalent.
When the General Assembly reconvened in 1949, the Board no longer openly opposed desegregation. Some groups from the north side of Indianapolis did oppose the desegregation school bill, arguing that legislation “cannot change the social order.” There was also some racist literature from the era of Klan domination in the 20s circulating. Nevertheless, the bill passed the House 58 to 21. In the Senate, it was reported out of committee after Governor Schricker announced his support. It passed the Senate 31-5 with the five negative votes coming from Republicans and thirteen other Republican members walking out rather than voting.
After the legislation was passed, IPS duly began redrawing districts and generally complying with the desegregation requirements. However, this seems to have accelerated white flight to the suburbs and de facto rather than de jure (in fact rather than by law) segregation became the main issue. In Indianapolis, this apparently became known as “the Shortridge problem.” (Which caught my eye, because my Dad went to Shortridge. It’s my understanding that my grandparents lived near the Butler campus but moved around that time — most likely they were part of the white flight.)
Shortridge had, at one time, been ranked one of the twenty-five best high schools in the nation. Kurt Vonnegut, who went there, wrote of Shortridge:
[Shortridge is] my dream of an America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school. So I knew that such a school was possible. Shortridge High School in Indianapolis produced not only me, but the head writer on the I LOVE LUCY show (Madelyn Pugh). And, my God, we had a daily paper, we had a debating team, had a fencing team. We had a chorus, a jazz band, a serious orchestra. And all this with a Great Depression going on. And I wanted everybody to have such a school.
Through the 50s there was a significant influx of black students into Shortridge and a corresponding exodus of white students. By 1963, Shortridge was a majority black school. As this transition was taking place, many white parents asked the school board and administration to do something to reverse the trend. In 1964, a study of “the Shortridge problem” was commissioned. One proposal was to shift two elementary schools that were primarily black and have those students go to Washington or Northwest while, at the same time, taking two elementary schools that were primarily white and sending those students to Shortridge. The white elementary schools had, in the past, been feeders into Shortridge, but started going to Arlington when that school was built. The parents from the primarily black schools were relatively accepting of the proposal. The parents from the white schools were not. That proposal was ultimately dropped. (The linked article above and again here is a graduate thesis by Sophia Nicholas Gonis from 1964 entitled “An Analysis of Desegregation Trends in the Indianapolis Public Schools.”)
My Mom went to Shortridge in the mid-50s, and my Dad ran the music program there in the late 60s. Vonnegut was right- it really was a special school.
When I was a kid we moved back to Indy and IPS in 7th or 8th grade and stayed 1 year at Arlington, then escaped I At the time I was incredibly unimpressed with the entire IPS system, and their school board. That impression remains to this day and the more I read about it the more correct I feel.
Dog, you often use the quotation (“Indiana being the “middle-finger of the South thrust up into the north.”) Like I use “Ain’t [g]od been good to Indiana.” I had never seen this before reading your blog. But I was once talking to a the owner of a company that my client was going to acquire. I don’t know how we got on the topic, but he asked me about Indiana politics. He was a socially liberal guy from Minnesota. I commented that the Mason-Dixon line was just north of Muncie.