CHAPTER 3
Willing Combatants
When Rosetta Crutchfield and her two young children arrived in Rochester from Sanford, Florida, in 1948, the city and its Black community had not yet undergone their great transition. Jobs were still available, and she found one immediately as a nurse’s aide. The housing market in the Third Ward, though strongly discriminatory, was not as predatory as it soon would become. The nearby School 3, where her children enrolled, was not yet marked by strict segregation. “We were active; I was happy,” her second daughter, Nellie King, said. “If anyone had a problem it was not mine. A lot of my Black friends couldn’t understand me, but I just couldn’t see making problems where there wasn’t any.”
Rosetta felt the same way. Their house was strictly “race-neutral,” her daughter recalled, to the point that Nellie and her siblings were not allowed to mention people as Black or white. Nor did they discuss how they came to be one of the first Black families on Frost Avenue when they moved there in the 1950s, or how their white neighbors fled shortly thereafter. When Nellie was in middle school and a teacher suggested the white students would soon be forced to bring baseball bats with them to bed—that was not discussed, either. “We just had a way of living so we didn’t deal with it,” she said. “She did not want to talk about race issues.”1
It was an old strategy for the old Black Rochester, but times were changing. By the early 1960s, Nellie had unleashed her neatly pressed hair into its natural state. On a class trip to New York City she found African clothing to wear and discovered that not all Black women “had to girdle up our booties.” She recognized the way people like her had been caricaturized and made to feel less than human. “It was awesome, absolutely awesome, to learn I didn’t have to go through this process of changing my hair to look white; to look as non-Black as possible,” she said. She joined the NAACP Youth Council and the Young Democrats and dreamed up African names for the children she would have.
Her mother, too, began to change. She took a job as a teacher’s aide at School 19, where she observed the steady increase in migrant children from the South—children like her own—and the way their education differed from the norm for white children, with portable classrooms taking up half the space on the playground. She watched as Rochester police brought dogs to a dance her children and other Black teenagers were attending. She recalled the oppressive racism and menial factory work she’d fled in Sanford. And when someone came through the neighborhood seeking plaintiffs for a potential NAACP class action lawsuit against the Rochester City School District for racial discrimination, Rosetta Crutchfield signed up. “That was out of character,” Nellie said. “Mom wasn’t really an activist. She became involved when she thought she needed to be involved.” In Rochester and across the country, more and more Black men and women were making the same calculation.2
The sense of urgency embodied by Rosetta Crutchfield only emerged as Rochester’s Black population grew. Certainly Black residents in city schools had faced discrimination before the Great Migration; what they lacked were the numbers to fight it consistently. Black children in the city were so few as to escape the attention of the press and other chroniclers except in unusual instances. In 1938, for instance, Black children made up 1 percent of the overall enrollment of 47,000. Even at School 3 in the Third Ward, where by far the largest number attended, they made up only 14 percent of the student body. As a result, from 1856, the year the Black school closed, until the first stirrings of the Civil Rights era a hundred years later, accounts of the growth of the school district omitted Black students entirely or mentioned them only in passing—unless there was trouble.3
Few Black residents from the early twentieth century left recollections of their time in Rochester schools. One who did was William Warfield, who found his singing voice while attending Washington High School. He wrote in his autobiography of growing up in “a climate of tolerance and remarkable good will” in Rochester in the 1920s and 1930s:
Rochester was such an egalitarian environment that my youngest days were untainted by any of those psychologically damaging encounters with racism that too often blight the young lives of adult children elsewhere. . . .
We all still believed in the idea of America as a melting pot, and my high school, like my neighborhood, was a real healthy cauldron. If some of the other ethnic groups didn’t always take to Negroes all that well, it was rarely a cause of unpleasantness. If there were any problems I wasn’t aware of them.4
Elsie Scott, an early Black nurse in Rochester who graduated from East High School in 1926, recalled that “from a very young age, until perhaps the issue of dating arose, she [was] accepted socially on equal terms with the other youngsters in her class. They were all in and out of each other’s homes, attending school functions together, walking home together.” Her career was temporarily blocked, however, when she applied for nursing school and was rejected at every local hospital.5 Joseph and Pauline Moore had ten children attend School 31 and then East High School. One of their daughters, Joan Moore, recalled: “The teachers knew the family and had great respect for the family. Prejudice came not from the teachers but from people in the neighborhood.” Still, she described getting into a fight with a white classmate after the great boxer Joe Louis won the heavyweight title in 1937; he told her that Louis had won the fight “because ‘he was a n——’ and that’s all we know how to do.”6
Even in desegregated schools, Black students often had to contend with teachers’ harmful biases, ranging from paternalism to outright bigotry. “There is, on the part of the teachers, a marked lack of interest in, sympathy with, and understanding of Negro pupils,” a set of statewide investigators reported in 1939. “They do not properly advise or encourage the pupils with respect to their continuation beyond the compulsory school ages.”7
A prominent controversy occurred in 1895 when Susan B. Anthony appeared alongside the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells during a speaking event at Rochester’s First Baptist Church. When a combative audience member asked why more Black people did not move to the North if conditions in the South were so bad—this was before the Great Migration—Anthony answered that it was because “they get no better treatment in the North than they do in the South.” To illustrate the point, she described a recent incident in which School 3 had barred a Black girl from attending a school dance on the grounds that her presence would keep all the other students away. “I consider that the outrage on the feelings of that colored girl was the result of the same spirit that inspires the lynchings of the South,” Anthony concluded.8
Reporters found the teacher in question at her home to hear her side of the story. As she explained it, she simply had told the fourteen-year-old girl “in as kind of a manner as possible” that “the other pupils, being neighbors and friends, would naturally dance [only] with each other, and that if they did that she would not be able to learn, and consequently would not get the worth of her [admission].” It had all been smoothed out, she said, the girl “smiling and apparently contented,” until Anthony got wind of it.9
Even a small number of Black teachers would surely have helped ameliorate conditions for Black students. Alas, such teachers did not exist. The first known Black teacher in Rochester (other than at the Black-only school prior to 1856) was Florence Sprague, who appears to have been a niece of Nathan Sprague, husband of Frederick Douglass’s daughter Rosetta. She was appointed in July 1889 and spent the 1889–90 school year as a “supply teacher,” or building-wide substitute teacher, at School 24. She also served briefly as the superintendent of the Sunday school at AME Zion Church, then trained as a stenographer and went on to serve as the executive secretary to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute.10 The next Black teacher in the city was Viola Van Buren, a 1916 graduate of West High School and the Rochester Normal School teacher training program who taught at School 10 beginning in 1918.11 Helen Sellers, also a graduate of the normal school, followed in about 1923. The first Black teacher to make a lasting impact was Bessie Walls, who was appointed in 1928 and remained for more than thirty years until her death in 1962. “Back in those days a black teacher had to be very, very well qualified to work in the schools,” one of Walls’s classmates, Marie Daley, said. Even as the Black population began to inch upward, Walls remained the district’s only Black teacher for many years. She was joined in 1948 by Letha Ridley, a North Carolina native who later became the district’s second Black principal and worked until 1973.12
Van Buren, Sellers, and Walls were three of only four Black teachers to graduate from the city’s teacher preparatory school by 1939. The fourth apparently was instructed “through oral oath” not to seek a job in the city school district after graduation, and many others were discouraged from applying in the first place. “These conditions leave grave suspicions that there exists a practice of racial discrimination in Rochester,” state investigators found in 1939. “And, it has been reported that in some instances, such discouragement has been fortified with threats and in fact the deliberate failure of some of these students.”13
One of the most memorable figures in Black education in the early twentieth century was Isabella Dorsey, who operated outside the school system altogether. She and her husband Thomas Dorsey had no children of their own but instead, beginning in 1910, took in a number of Black foster children. Rochester Police Chief Joseph Quigley learned of their efforts and arranged some private financial support, helping Dorsey purchase a site in the Forest Lawn area of the Lake Ontario shoreline in 1916. Owners of nearby vacation cottages quickly raised an objection, at which point supporters raised $15,000 to purchase a twenty-six-acre farm at South Clinton and Elmwood avenues, the current site of McQuaid Jesuit High School.14
The Dorsey Home for Colored Children opened there in 1918 with about twenty-five Black orphan children up to age sixteen; a later expansion increased capacity to thirty-five. Thomas Dorsey ran the farm and Isabella Dorsey oversaw the kindergarten and orphanage. The older children attended School 24 on the other side of Pinnacle Hill, walking in good weather and going by sleigh in the snow. As a result, that school had the greatest Black enrollment of any in the city during that period with the exception of School 3 in the Third Ward.15 Once a year they joined other disadvantaged Rochester children in the Orphans’ Day parade, riding in convertibles up to Manitou Beach for festivities including dancing, games and—specifically for the Black children—a watermelon-eating contest.16
FIGURE 3.1. Isabella Dorsey, seen here in 1921, cared for Black orphans in Rochester at the Dorsey Home for Colored Children from 1910 to 1922. Photo by Albert Stone, from the Albert R. Stone Negative Collection, Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, NY.
Dorsey left the home in 1922 to oversee an industrial boarding school for older Black children in Cattaraugus County. The orphanage came under the auspices of the Rochester Community Chest, which continued to run it until 1928. By that time the majority of the children came from elsewhere in the state, as there were few other similar institutions outside New York City. The Community Chest determined it could no longer sustain the expense. The children were dispersed back into foster care and the land was sold, with the proceeds going into a fund for the education of Black orphan children. Dorsey died three years later in June 1932. “It is said that having to surrender this work preyed upon Mrs. Dorsey and she failed steadily from the time she left the school,” the Democrat and Chronicle wrote.17
Dorsey and her pupils aside, Black education in the pre–Civil Rights period made the news only when controversy arose. In 1951, for example, the local NAACP chapter complained to the school board about use of the children’s book Little Black Sambo in elementary schools. The title character is South Asian, not African American, but is drawn in a racially exaggerated “pick-aninny” style. Such books, chapter secretary Walter Bonner wrote, “are to some children their first introduction to Negroes [and] strengthen the conclusion among the uninformed and prejudiced that Negroes are all the same.”18
Superintendent James Spinning said he was unaware of the negative connotation but acceded to the request nonetheless. The decision set off a furious debate in the newspapers’ letters to the editor sections. “Doubtless next they will be banning Shakespeare because those of English descent will find that some of his works poke fun at the English,” one person wrote. Another, taking a textual approach, noted that Sambo in fact carries the day in the story against three hungry tigers and concluded, “The dark-skinned peoples could not ask for a better ambassador of good will.”19
Demographic change was not the only factor contributing to the growing restlessness of Black people in northern cities like Rochester. The four years the United States spent fighting in Europe and Asia had been, for its Black citizens, a dissonant and ultimately catalytic time. Over and over they saw their country fail to live up to the principles it supposedly was defending. Blood donated to the War Department was processed through segregated blood banks to prevent “contamination.” Domestic military bases, mostly located in the South, were strictly segregated, and northern Black soldiers were shocked at the treatment they received when they ventured off-base, including lynching and other racist violence. Military jobs were often sorted by race, with Black enlistees consistently being assigned the lowest paid, most menial duties.20
At the same time, the massive wartime propaganda apparatus extolling the American values of liberty and opportunity had proven inconvenient when it came to Black citizens requesting the same. For Black Americans both at home and abroad, the disconnect between the government’s democratic propaganda and their own lived experience was impossible to overlook. “If it was cause for international weeping that Jews were beaten in Berlin and scourged into a loathesome ghetto in Warsaw, what about a tear for black ghettos in America?” Roy Wilkins, later president of the NAACP, asked in 1944: “Hitler jammed our white people into their logically untenable position. Forced to oppose him for the sake of the life of the nation, they were jockeyed into declaring against his racial theories. . . . But the irritation at having to say these things in their extremity, and the anger at the literal interpretation of them by the belabored Negro, made our white people angrier and angrier in their insistence upon the status quo.”21
US cities saw a wave of race riots in 1943 as questions about access to work, housing, and basic civil liberties exploded into violence. The most devastating was in Detroit, where a fistfight at an amusement park developed into three days of rioting with dozens killed. Scores of lesser incidents were reported across the country, and though Black Americans made few tangible gains as a result, these events again made evident to white Americans that racial tension would not defuse itself. The pioneering Black educator Mary McLeod Bethune compared a riot in Harlem to the Boston Tea Party and connected Black Americans’ grievances with those of the oppressed in China and Russia: “Along with other good Americans the Negro has been . . . fighting now on land and sea and in the air to beat back these forces of oppression and tyranny and discrimination. Why, then, should we be surprised when at home as well as abroad he fights back against these same forces?”22
At the same time, a more comprehensive effort was underway to harness and expand the increasingly powerful Black vote in northern cities. In cities on the leading edge of the Great Migration, such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, painstaking voter registration efforts were helping the Black community wrest concessions from white candidates in exchange for their support—and, eventually, putting Black candidates into office. By 1956 there were three Black Congressmen and about forty Black state legislators across the country as well as a growing allotment of judges, school trustees, and city council members.23 In the North as in the South, registering Black people to vote and helping them secure housing and work was a labor-intensive job undertaken by myriad individuals and local organizations. Increasingly in the postwar years, those advocates worked under the aegis of the NAACP. Founded in 1909, the NAACP had by then emerged as the pre-eminent national organizing force in voter registration, political advocacy, and civil rights litigation. National membership exploded from about 51,000 in 1940 to more than 500,000 in 1946 and the national leadership undertook an aggressive desegregation policy.24 This included lawsuits and protests regarding public transportation and housing but eventually had the greatest impact in education—to be specific, the education of a young Kansas girl named Linda Brown.
Whereas de facto segregation in northern schools had mostly disappeared by the mid-twentieth century, it was alive and well in the former Confederacy and bordering states. Not only were the races kept strictly segregated but every conceivable objective and subjective measure showed plain inequality, despite purported laws to the contrary. Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in 1930 spent five times as much per pupil on white schools compared to Black schools; South Carolina spent ten times as much.25 Countless Black children had the humiliating experience of passing a well-appointed white school on their way to their own dilapidated building or seeing a bus full of white children zoom past as they made their way on foot. “Nothing rode the bus but the whites,” one former student of a Black school in Macon County, Alabama, recalled. “And they would ride and throw trash, throw rocks and everything at us on the road and hoop and holler, “n——, n——, n——,” all up and down the road. We weren’t allowed to say one word back to them or throw back or nothing, because if you threw back at them you was going to jail.”26
Segregation in the South, and particularly in southern schools, rested on a seemingly firm legal foundation. The truest bedrock was the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court had heard a complaint from Homer Plessy, a Louisiana “octaroon” who protested being barred from first-class train accommodations on the basis of his race. The Court upheld the ban and introduced into the legal lexicon the term “separate but equal.” It recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment had ensured “absolute equality of the two races before the law,” but did not go further to require “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Plessy was followed by three cases from 1899 to 1927 that upheld and extended its logic.27 Together they cemented segregated schools as “an inviolable institution,” the historian Richard Kluger concluded: “And since the South encountered neither moral pangs nor legal obstacles when it allocated to black schools only a fraction of the funds it gave to the white ones under the so-called separate-but-equal doctrine, the Southern Negro faced exceedingly bleak prospects in hoping his children might obtain a better education than he himself had been permitted.”28 Even so, the prospect of imminent change was apparent to those who looked for it. “The great majority of Southern conservative white people do not see the handwriting on the wall,” the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his influential 1944 study of race in the United States. “[Yet] not since Reconstruction has there been more reason to anticipate fundamental changes in American race relations, changes which will involve a development toward the American ideals.”29
Brown v. Board of Education, the realization of that change, was itself the culmination of twenty years of groundwork by NAACP-backed advocates, both in courtrooms and in Jim Crow cities, towns, and villages throughout the South. Starting in the 1930s, the NAACP and its energetic counsel, Thur-good Marshall, laid out a plan of attack on segregated institutions and, eventually, the institution of segregation itself. “I think we’ve humored the South long enough,” Marshall said. “It’s only by lawsuits and legislation that we’ll ever teach reactionaries the meaning of the 14th Amendment.”30
A series of federal court decisions regarding equal access to colleges, particularly graduate programs, created a new set of integrationist precedents to contend with the harsh facts of Plessy. Important incremental progress was achieved thanks to related demands by Heman Sweatt, a mail carrier from Houston, Texas, seeking admission to the University of Texas’s law school, and George McLaurin, a veteran Black teacher who applied for a doctoral program at the University of Oklahoma. Sweatt was placed into a hastily created, poorly supported “law school” for Black students consisting of four rented rooms in an office building near the state capitol; McLaurin was admitted under court order but kept physically separated from white students in the classroom, library, and cafeteria.
In both cases, decided on the same day in 1950, the Supreme Court found that Plessy’s “separate but equal” standard had not been met. The Sweatt v. Painter decision in particular was encouraging. Not only were the physical accommodations and library holdings unequal, the unanimous Court held, but the white school “possess[ed] to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school”—things such as reputation in the community and the value of alumni connections. What is more, segregating Black would-be lawyers from white people—i.e., “85 percent of the population of the State, [including] most of the lawyers, witnesses, jurors, judges and other officials with whom petitioner will inevitably be dealing when he becomes a member of the Texas Bar”—made it impossible for their education to match what offered at the University of Texas.31
Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents left the doctrine of “separate but equal” in place but contained important logical inferences about what equality entailed. Without saying as much, the Court suggested that a segregated Black institution embedded in an avowedly white supremacist culture could scarcely meet the standard of Plessy, no matter the circumstances. Still, the applicability of that point to the much more controversial question of public K–12 education was far from evident. “The legal gap between the Sweatt and McLaurin cases on the one hand and an outright destruction of the Plessy precedent appeared to be appallingly wide, and [Marshall] and his colleagues were not at all sure they could cross it,” historian Alfred Kelly, a friend of Marshall’s, wrote.32
Doubtful or not, the NAACP legal team moved to capitalize on the opening by building cases in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia where students faced a gantlet of challenges: lack of bus transportation and school supplies, outdated facilities and overcrowded classrooms, poorly paid teachers, and no extracurricular activities. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, white students got more than three times the per-pupil funding of Black students, who were forced to clean their building themselves in the absence of paid janitors. The science lab at one Washington, DC, school for Black children consisted of a Bunsen burner and a goldfish bowl.33
Brown v. Board of Education comprised five different cases, each a variation on the inadequacy of segregated public education for Black children. Linda Brown, whose name was listed first alphabetically among the plaintiffs, had to walk across a railroad switchyard to get to the all-Black Monroe School in Topeka, Kansas, even though the white Sumner School was closer to her house. Unlike in some southern cities, though, Topeka’s white schools were only marginally newer and better resourced than the Black ones. Class sizes and teacher experience were roughly equal, and course offerings were similar. Indeed, many school districts in the South and elsewhere had taken hasty but significant steps to create parity between their white and Black schools, hoping to forestall more consequential judicial intervention of the kind the NAACP was attempting. Brand-new buildings for Black students were referred to derisively as “Supreme Court schools.” This was a critical point for the plaintiffs, and one that followed directly from Sweatt in particular; new facilities or well-trained teachers alone do not make for equitable education. As an expert witness put it during the preliminary Brown litigation: “If the colored children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these colored children must live, then the colored child’s curriculum is being greatly curtailed.”34
The NAACP’s key expert at the trial was Kenneth Clark, a young Columbia University psychologist who had earned the half-joking nickname “the doll man.” He and his wife, Mamie Clark, had done interesting research on the self-image and self-esteem of young children by showing them white and Black dolls and asking which was “good,” which was more attractive, and which looked like them. Black children, particularly those raised in highly segregated communities, consistently showed a preference for white dolls, which the Clarks interpreted as an expression of low self-esteem acquired via corrosive anti-Black prejudice. Many both within the NAACP legal team and in the opposition dismissed the Clarks’ work as squishy social science, less convincing than the hard facts of classroom sizes or teacher salaries. But on May 17, 1954, when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s unanimous finding in favor of Linda Brown and the other Black petitioners, the impact of the Clarks’ research was apparent. “To separate [Black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,” Warren wrote. The NAACP had invited the Court to abolish the “separate but equal” standard and the Court did so emphatically.35
The Brown decision dropped like a bomb in the South. The cherished institution of segregated education was outlawed, even if many reactionary politicians quickly coalesced around a strategy that came to be known as “massive resistance.” The seeds of the decades-long fight for integration—or, at least, desegregation—were contained in four fateful words in the Court’s 1955 follow-up decision relating to the implementation of the historic ruling. School districts themselves were responsible for devising solutions, the Court ruled, and should do so “with all deliberate speed.”36 This speed proved to be deliberate indeed.
In Rochester, newspaper editorial boards praised the decision at a marked distance but called for patience in its implementation. Most striking in retrospect is their certainty, too obvious to require explication, that the ruling in Brown was something for the South to grapple with alone. The legality of school segregation in Kansas and South Carolina had no more to do with cities like Rochester, the editors believed, than the buses in Berlin or the weather in Warsaw. It was a foreign policy matter to pontificate on—to congratulate, in this case—in the assurance that its reverberations would peter out far short of the Genesee Valley. And indeed, as long as de jure segregation had remained in place, the de facto variety in Rochester and cities like it went mostly unmolested. After Brown, that changed.37
When the Brown decision was announced in 1954, Anne Micheaux had just turned three, still two years away from joining her older sister, Lydia, at School 3, just down the street from their home in Rochester’s Third Ward. The ruling had no immediate effect on either girl, but in time they would become principal actors in the resultant local drama. For that, they could thank their mother, Katherine Jordan Harris, and her father, Anthony Jordan, upstairs of whose medical office the family lived.
Jordan, a native of Guyana and graduate of the Howard University College of Medicine, opened his practice in Rochester in 1932 and quickly became known as the doctor for the poor, making house calls even for those who couldn’t afford to pay. Instead, he said, “Tell the Lord about me; there’ll be no charges.”38 He demanded that his children and grandchildren follow in his footsteps, and his daughter, Katherine, became a social worker. “She was just born with a strong feeling of right from wrong and a willingness to speak that truth,” Anne Micheaux said. “[She was] a willing combatant—at least as far as my own formative years are concerned.” As Anne and her sister progressed through school, that sometimes meant heated parent-teacher conferences during which Harris protested her daughters being excluded from advanced-track courses and “teacher evaluations that had more to do with expectations due to race than strictly my performance.”39
The Jordan family was gentry on Adams Street, but the community around them was changing. From 1940 to 1950 the Black population in Rochester grew by 133 percent. The following decade it grew by another 211 percent, to 23,586 in 1960. The continuous arrival of migrants from Florida, South Carolina, and other points south had many lasting implications for white and Black residents alike; chief among them, the city’s two traditional Black neighborhoods swelled to bursting. A 1958 study of mid-sized upstate cities by the State Commission against Discrimination showed that the housing market in Rochester was uniquely hostile to Black buyers and renters. Sellers and banks were unwilling to deal with Black people and white neighbors undertook coordinated resistance efforts.40
Included in the wave of new arrivals was a small but influential cadre of young civil rights activists who greeted the Brown decision with enthusiasm. Many were scientists and engineers hired by Kodak during or after World War II, seeking opportunity in housing and education commensurate with their hard-earned professional status. They were known informally as the Young Turks; for a time, they organized through the Monroe County Non-Partisan Political League and other groups. All were emboldened by the gains made in federal desegregation cases and eager to see them translated in Rochester. This early cohort of Black NAACP-aligned activists—the Kodak chemist Walter Cooper, the Urban League president (and later school board member), Laplois Ashford, the Rochester Congress of Racial Equity president, Hannah Storrs, the Monroe County Non-Partisan League president, Obadiah Williamson, and John and Constance Mitchell—was responsible for moving Rochester from the relative conservatism of Charles Lunsford and old Black Rochester into the faster waters of the early Civil Rights era.41
Although the arrival of agricultural migrants had shaken the established Black community, these skilled Black newcomers represented a more subtle challenge to the status quo for respected Black citizens who had in large part attained their positions through longevity and service rather than advanced technical education. A 1958 survey of upstate cities showed great nuance within their small but growing Black communities:
The older residents often look upon the highly-skilled newcomers as rash upstarts with pretensions far greater than merited by their pedigrees . . . and with attitudes toward present social patterns which may undo all the progress which has been made. The new professionals, on the other hand, tend to look upon the “oldsters” as persons of inferior training, with questionable reasons for pride in their lineage, and with a tendency toward inertia and acceptance of the status quo. . . .
Neither group, however, appears to have much contact with the great mass of the Negro population, with whom they have little in common and for whom they often have little respect. Many representatives of both may, in fact, associate more with whites than with other Negroes.42
Frank McElrath arrived in Rochester from West Virginia in 1953 to work at Kodak as a chemist. He observed in the existing Black community a “minuscule professional class . . . [who] had a vested interest in things not getting too far out of hand, because they’d paid a terrible price to achieve what they had achieved.” With that middle-class group effectively sidelined, McElrath said, leadership at the dawn of the national Civil Rights era was left to new arrivals:
A good deal of Black people felt they’d gone as far north as possible to go without swimming, and here they stand: “We must do something about the problem here or live forever with it.” And no one was willing to live forever with it. . . .
The people who should have been the natural leaders of the Black community turned out to have too much of a vested interest in the community. . . . Consequently, the leaders turned out to be people who were more radical, newer to the city of Rochester, somewhat less caring about who is who and what is what in Rochester. And consequently, it was perhaps ordained when those people were forced to take leadership that we’d have a violent confrontation sooner or later.43
The Young Turks were seen as the “rash upstarts” in the community for only a decade or so. After the 1964 uprising they were largely eclipsed by an even more aggressive faction typified by Franklin Florence and FIGHT, but not before winning important political gains—and setting into motion a prominent attack on school segregation in the city.
The children crammed into the Third and Seventh Wards had to go to school somewhere, of course. The strict neighborhood school model led to the emergence of schools where, for the first time, the majority of students were Black. In 1928 School 3 had 14 percent Black students, by far the largest percentage in the city; in 1963 it was one of five schools with more than 90 percent Black students, and Rochester had more mostly Black schools than any upstate district except Buffalo.44
As the demographics changed, enrollment rose. Two kindergarten classes at School 3 with forty students each were held together in a single large hall, and teachers were forced to conduct classes in portable classrooms. When even those measures did not suffice, the school in 1959 rented additional classroom space in the basement of the neighboring Corn Hill Methodist Church. It is not recorded whether anyone in the school was aware of the grim historical analogy; racial segregation had forced the “African School” in the same neighborhood into the basement of AME Zion Church 114 years earlier, something Frederick Douglass had blasted as an act of “degradation (and) cruelty.” School board candidates in 1959 proclaimed themselves “shocked” and “aghast” at the overcrowding but despaired at finding a way to transport the School 3 children to the nearby, mostly white School 17, where an entire eight-classroom wing of the building was empty.45
In 1960 the school board approved spending $1.3 million to build a new, 750-student school on Reynolds Street, School 2. Officials hoped the location would draw from both white and Black neighborhoods, creating a fairly integrated building. It would not be ready until September 1961, though, so in July 1960 the RCSD administration put forth a plan to double-shift some students at mostly Black Schools 3, 4, and 19, shortening students’ school day by seventy-five minutes in the process. Superintendent Howard Seymour endorsed the proposal as “the least unwieldy” possible. Opponents, led by the NAACP’s Walter Cooper and parent Jeannette Woodland, wondered why the students couldn’t instead transfer to mostly white schools nearby. Woodland, who gathered more than two hundred petition signatures, said that the proposal “reflects time-honored discriminatory practices which have led to the deterioration of intergroup relations.” Cooper said the shortened school day would “follow these youngsters as a serious handicap throughout their lives and will serve to perpetuate the frustrations and bitterness which characterize many of their parents.”46 The only reason the schools were overcrowded, they pointed out, was that Black residents were barred from moving out of the part of southwest Rochester where the schools were located.
The district and school board protested the characterization: “Discrimination is the last thing in the wide world this board can be accused of,” the school board president, Jacob Gitelman, said. Nonetheless, the following week the district rescinded the plan, saying it would instead rent space or put up more temporary classrooms for the five hundred or so students in question. It also adopted a resolution addressing the root concern: “The area served by these three schools is crowded because many of its residents are unwelcome in other parts of the city. . . . These children should not be penalized for a condition that exists in our community.” Already in 1959 the district predicted that School 2 would not be sufficient to solve the issue of overcrowding in the Third Ward schools when it opened in 1961, and indeed it was not.47 The double-shifting plan, short-lived as it was, proved in retrospect to be the first salvo in the Rochester City School District’s desegregation battle.
Two important factors favored the NAACP activists as the matter moved toward the courtroom in early 1962. First, the state’s Board of Regents was heading in a similar direction. In 1960 it published a position paper on “intercultural education” and set up an advisory council on educational segregation. Racially homogenous schools, the regents wrote, were “socially unrealistic” and “wasteful of manpower and talent, whether this situation occurs by law or by fact.”48 More decisive state action in the matter was still to come, but already by 1962 it was apparent that state education leaders were ready to address the question of racial segregation in some way.
Before the executive branch could move any further, the judicial branch sprang into action with a landmark decision in the downstate city of New Rochelle. In 1960, eleven families in its Lincoln Elementary School, 94 percent Black, sued over their assignment to a school that was effectively segregated by race. As in Rochester and other northern cities, the unsubtle pressures on Black residents of New Rochelle had herded them into strictly segregated neighborhoods. The situation was exacerbated by the way school enrollment lines in the city were gerrymandered to keep Black children together along with a transfer-out mechanism provided almost exclusively for white children. The result was a system of “neighborhood schools” where, somehow, Black and white children living on the same block were sent to different schools.
In a groundbreaking ruling in federal court, Judge Irving Kaufman ordered the district to create a desegregation plan, using sweeping language to extend the obligations of Brown in a way northern school districts had not foreseen: “[Brown] was premised on the factual conclusion that a segregated education created and maintained by official acts had a detrimental and deleterious effect on the educational and mental development of the minority group children. . . . With these principles clear in mind, I see no basis to draw a distinction, legal or moral, between segregation established by the formality of a dual system of education, as in Brown, and that created by gerrymandering of school district lines and transferring of white children as in the instant case.”49 It was the first major school segregation case in the North. All-Black Lincoln was shuttered two years later as part of the New Rochelle school board’s reluctant response. The more significant reverberation, though, was in turning integration advocates’ attention north of the Mason-Dixon line. As Rochester activist Glen Claytor wrote: “If it is sustained by higher courts, the New Rochelle decision will provide a fulcrum with which to pry loose the adherence to the artificial school district boundaries now common in many northern cities—including our own.”50
Indeed, 1961–62 was a period of changing focus for the NAACP. As Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins said: “After the 1954 court decision, we concentrated on the South, where we felt it very important, psychologically and politically, to score victories. Those victories have been won, even if on a token basis, and we now feel it’s time to turn our attention northward.” By the end of 1962 the organization had filed scores of desegregation lawsuits in Western and Northern school districts, including sixteen in New York and ten each in New Jersey and Illinois. “Public schools segregated in fact in the North and West no longer can be accepted through tradition or custom, or excused as the inevitable result of segregated housing,” the NAACP’s June Shagaloff wrote. “The fight against them will be pressed despite resistance from some educators, white parents . . . or real estate and political interests intent on maintaining the status quo.”51
One major contributor to the Rochester integration movement in the late 1950s was the chairman of the NAACP’s education committee, Walter Cooper. He was born in 1921 in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city outside Pittsburgh to which his parents had migrated from the agricultural South. The schools there were tenuously integrated, and though his parents were barely educated themselves, they insisted on perfect attendance from their children. Cooper absorbed from his mother what he called his fundamental philosophy: “You have a deep and abiding faith in your humanity . . . and you stand for what’s right no matter the circumstances. She said, ‘You’ll pay a heavy price, but you must do it.’” Already in high school he led student protests against the racist curriculum and, as a star of the football team, organized a well-timed walkout to integrate the cheerleading squad.52 Cooper graduated as high school salutatorian in 1946 and attended nearby Washington and Jefferson College on a football scholarship. After graduating and spending two years as a teaching assistant at Howard University, he came to the University of Rochester in 1952 for a PhD program in chemistry.
Although the university had yet to shake its reputation for hostility to Black students, the campus NAACP chapter had attracted a core of Black and white students committed to social justice. There Cooper became active in the local civil rights movement, first as chairman of a scholarship committee for Black students, then, after earning his degree in 1957, as education chairman and a spokesman for the local NAACP. Inspired in part by the New Rochelle lawsuit, Cooper organized a study of segregative practices in Rochester schools showing, among other things, that majority-Black schools often received the least funding—and that funding tended to decrease as enrollment shifted toward minority students.53
Compelling as the pattern of segregation was, Cooper found the way to legal action blocked. Quintin Primo, pastor at St. Simon’s Episcopal Church, was president of the local NAACP branch in 1961 and in many ways continued the conservative leadership style of Lunsford. By the late 1950s he was coming under increasing criticism for, as Cooper called it, “playing footsie with the white power structure.”54 One particular flashpoint was the siting of a low-income public housing project, Chatham Gardens, in an already poor neighborhood against the wishes of its residents.55 Primo in 1961 declined to endorse the school-segregation study for possible action from the NAACP, but it proved to be one of the last decisions he made. Several months later he retired under pressure, leaving for Chicago where he eventually became an Episcopal bishop.
In his absence, Cooper’s project gained steam. Primo’s replacement, Reuben Davis, announced in late March the NAACP was studying the issue of school segregation with an eye toward “approach[ing] local authorities with it and . . . [doing] something about it in light of the New Rochelle case.” The school board discussed the question in April but settled only on conferring with the Monroe County Human Relations Commission. In early May, Davis said a lawsuit was imminent: “We are almost positive—in view of the fact that the board of education has done nothing—that we will take legal action.” The school board president, Frances Cooke, complained that he was being hasty: “I thought we had made it plain that we were proceeding with the problem. . . . I am sure every member of the board recognizes the problem and I am certain we are going to deal with in the best possible way we can.”56
Cooke’s protest was fruitless. The lawsuit was filed on May 28, 1962, in the federal Western District of New York. It was brought in the names of twenty-two children in ten families, the first listed of whom was six-year-old Allen Aikens, a student at School 2.57 They included, too, the children of Rosetta Crutchfield and Katherine Jordan Harris.
The brief complaint alleged that the district and school board had violated the plaintiffs’ rights under federal law by operating racially segregated schools and upholding that segregation through school placement policies. The plaintiffs asked for an injunction against the district to prevent it “from continuing to enforce rules, regulations and procedures which effect and result in the maintenance of segregated schools in Rochester.” They requested a desegregation plan to be submitted to the court, and, in a double negative, asked that the district “be further enjoined from failing to adopt the establishment of boundaries of schools for the purpose of creating and perpetuating positive racial integration patterns rather than perpetuation of racial segregation patterns.”58
There were two noteworthy aspects to the Aikens lawsuit, one of them unique in the nation. First, unlike in New Rochelle, the complaint did not allege that the defendants had taken specific actions to cause segregation. “Our contention is simply that it exists,” Davis said. “Whether it is intentional or unintentional, the result, an inferior situation, is the same.” Second, for the first time in the North or South, the plaintiffs included both Black and white children. In other words, it held that white children’s constitutional rights were being violated by being kept separate from Black children, as well as the converse.59
Among the white parents holding that opinion were Jerome and Ruth Balter, who lived with their three children on Cedarwood Terrace in the Brown-croft neighborhood. Both Balters grew up in New York City and shared a sharp sense of social justice and a willingness to fight for it. Jerome was more effective as an organizer, whereas Ruth was “the one who was a very critical thinker,” their youngest son, David, said. In 1955 they came to Rochester, where Jerome Balter worked as an industrial engineer. They made friends in the Black community and sent their children to the Frank Fowler Dow School 52. The Balters were among a handful of liberal Jews in a generally conservative white neighborhood and school. “It was growing up in a contrarian setting. . . . [like] a little bit of a siege mentality,” David Balter recalled. “I would go with [my parents] down Joseph Avenue for leafletting or something like that.” His father and brother attended the March on Washington in 1963, and his mother missed traveling to the historical march on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma only after a jar fell from a kitchen cabinet and hit her on the head just before she was to leave home. The Balter children, David, Joseph, and Kathe, made up one of four white families to join the Aikens lawsuit. Ruth Balter recalled that her husband Jerome was active in recruiting plaintiffs for it. Participating, she said, “seemed very obvious to us at the time. . . . We understood the importance of it for our kids as well as for all kids. It wasn’t just a do-good attitude—we frankly were concerned about what kind of exposure our own kids had.”60
Another of the white plaintiff families had recently relocated to Rochester as well. Mark and Susan Faegre arrived from Washington, DC, in 1960; their father had gotten a job at the University of Rochester. The Faegres, too, attended the March on Washington in 1963. “They were just really socially active,” Susan (Faegre) deFay said. “We were raised in that household just feeling like that’s how it’s supposed to be.” Her brother said it was in Rochester’s Cobbs Hill Park, playing with the neighbors, that he first heard the N-word used. “We were getting ready to play some kind of game and we did an eenie-meenie-meiny-moe and [a girl] said, ‘Catch an N-word by the toe,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘That’s not how it goes.’ And she said, ‘That’s how it goes around here.’”61
Leading the NAACP legal team were two lions of civil rights litigation, Jawn Sandifer and Robert L. Carter. Sandifer, chairman of the state NAACP legal redress committee, had successfully argued before the Supreme Court Henderson v. United States, an important precursor to Brown v. Board of Education. Carter had succeeded Thurgood Marshall as national NAACP chief counsel and played an important role in Brown itself, helping recruit Kenneth Clark as an expert witness. The local counsel was Reuben Davis, one of the few Black lawyers in the city. Born in Mississippi in 1920, Davis was drafted into the Army during his senior year of college at Virginia State University. He landed at Omaha Beach in France and took part in the Battle of the Bulge but, like so many other Black soldiers, could not escape the sting of prejudice back home. After finishing basic training in South Carolina he took a train to visit his family in Mississippi. The conductor walked him all the way down the track, past German prisoners of war sitting in second-class, to a cattle car where Black passengers were expected to ride. After the war Davis went to Boston University for law school and then moved to Rochester in 1955. His son, Mark Allan Davis, said becoming a lawyer was “a survival thing for him,” a way to hold fast to right and wrong. “In terms of processing social justice in his own life—he could say, ‘The law is concrete. This is what’s right,’” Davis said. He later became the first Black City Court judge, serving in that role for twenty-two years. In early 1962, he was in private practice when he succeeded Primo as leader of the local NAACP.62
Despite the long wind-up, the RCSD superintendent, Robert Springer, said that the timing of the NAACP lawsuit had come as a surprise. He had expected the organization to bring the results of its study to the board with some sort of proposal.63 The Gannett newspaper editorial pages, in the meantime, stepped forward to defend the community’s leisurely pace toward equity for its growing Black population. The Democrat and Chronicle called the lawsuit “a slap” and alleged without evidence that Black parents sought to place their children in integrated schools “merely to satisfy their . . . status ambitions.” It continued: “Rochester has always welcomed newcomers of all races, but the problems thus created cannot be solved overnight. Probably no city in the country has approached the challenge of assimilating its non-white population with more determination and sincerity than Rochester. . . . Could anything be less timely and more disturbing at this sensitive point in progress than a lawsuit which seems to impugn the integrity and good faith of the community?”64
The newly appointed school board president, Louis Cerulli, had made little secret of his preferred pace of change when it came to school integration. In April 1962 he predicted that segregation “would solve itself in time.” Upon being sworn in as president, he cautioned, “Many things we would like to do for our schools and for our city . . . cannot be done immediately.” And three days after the lawsuit was filed, Cerulli said that fellow board member Gitelman and Arthur Curran, the district’s attorney, should step aside from the defense of the lawsuit because they belonged to the NAACP (both declined to do so, though Curran delegated most of the legal work to a deputy).65
A week after the suit was filed, the board announced it would seek guidance from a newly formed state advisory body on racial imbalance. At the same time it responded in court with a vigorous denial of the charges. It avoided answering the question of de facto segregation directly, saying all schools in Rochester were integrated, given that children of any race were technically permitted in them as long as they lived in the appropriate attendance zone. Parents who wanted a more balanced racial mix in their children’s schools, the district said, had an obligation “to establish residency in an area not predominated by a homogenous racial group.” Davis dismissed the response as “specious at most,” ignoring the system’s “positive obligation to integrate the schools.”66
RCSD had taken another, more immediate step in response to the suit. The day it was filed, thirty-eight-year-old Alice Holloway Young was announced as the new principal of School 24 on Meigs Street. When she began the following September she became the first Black building leader in the city’s history. Young was born in 1923 in Warren County, North Carolina, just two generations removed from slavery. Her father never received an education, but her mother had graduated from the Hampton Institute in 1906 and became a schoolteacher. Alice’s school only went to eleventh grade, but a teacher recommended her to the admissions office at nearby Bennett College, where she enrolled at age sixteen with a single pair of shoes and a four-year work scholarship: scrubbing the floors, washing the windows, and polishing the brass on the thick oak doors. Her mother had taught her that any job she did was worth doing well; one day the college president called for the person responsible for shining the brass door plates. “They sent for me and I went down there shaking, poor little me,” she recalled. “And he said: ‘Miss Holloway, I never seen the brass on the door shine the way [it’s] shining now.’”67
She graduated in 1944 and took a job with the American Baptist Home Missionary Society teaching lessons in a migrant worker camp in Madison County, east of Syracuse. It was her first job off the farm and college campus and her first time teaching. The lessons typically began and ended with children and adults, weary from travel and billeting in converted cow barns, learning how to write their names. The experience propelled her toward a career in education that lasted forty years. She began in 1952 as a teacher at School 9, then became the district’s first “supervising teacher,” or assistant principal, in 1958. She also was one of the founding trustees of Monroe Community College when it opened in 1961. “[Superintendent Robert Springer] called me down and said, ‘I want you to go to School 24 on Meigs [Street] as a principal,’” Young recalled decades later. “And he said, ‘And I am going to be watching you.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and so many others will be watching me, but you’ll like what you see.’”68
Qualified as Young was, her appointment had every appearance of a diversionary tactic on the part of the district. Her selection as principal was announced two weeks after the board made the decision at a closed-door meeting. The Democrat and Chronicle ran a story about her ascent with a headline large enough to compete with the story of the lawsuit. It noted that she belonged to the NAACP but was not active, and she declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying she hadn’t known about it in advance. As Walter Cooper said: “When the status quo is under attack, there’s always the technique of pulling one Black person in to show it’s not as bad as you think it is.” Young stayed at School 24 for three years before being promoted once again, this time to lead the newly established Title I program in charge of distributing federal antipoverty funding.69
FIGURE 3.2. Alice Young, seen here in 1976, became the first Black person to serve as a school principal in Rochester in 1962. Photo by David Cook, courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle.
Underlying all the segregation-related tumult of the 1960s in Rochester and other northern cities, was a significant, long-unchallenged assumption about the historical record leading to school segregation. Integration foes insisted repeatedly that racial imbalance derived wholly from discrimination in housing and not at all from particular actions on the part of schools. “The North is troubled in many schools by a lack of integration, as opposed to contrived segregation,” the Democrat and Chronicle editorial page stated. “The Northern situation evolved spontaneously in the construction of schools in locations best serving children of various ethnic groups. It was not a conspiracy that segregation resulted.” Robert Springer said it more precisely in 1963: “No decision, ruling or school boundary has ever been made by the Board of Education or the administration which affects adversely or discriminates against any pupil because of race, color or religion.” It was therefore unfair, RCSD and community leaders held, to lay on the educational system the primary responsibility for rectifying the problem; RCSD could only hope to act in concert with progressive steps in other areas of government. Thus did the legal phrases de jure, meaning “by law,” and de facto, referring to a pattern that developed without any official stimulus, enter the vernacular of even casual observers.70
It is true that housing discrimination was the greatest factor in the development and persistence of segregated schools in Rochester. Perhaps because housing discrimination was so blatant, desegregation activists, including the NAACP in its 1962 legal challenge, did not challenge the district on its claim of perfect innocence. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, the key question was not whether RCSD bore blame for racial imbalance in its schools, but how much responsibility it had to proactively overturn residential patterns in its placement procedures.71
In fact, there is ample evidence that RCSD, beginning at least as early as the 1940s and continuing until the early 1960s, took steps to protect and expand on the effects of housing discrimination in the city’s schools. The strategies it used to do so were later recognized by courts in cities throughout the country. They included placing school facilities and drawing attendance zones in careful coordination with established residential segregation patterns; using optional attendance areas, which allowed white students an escape hatch in rapidly changing neighborhoods; and deploying mobile classrooms to accommodate overflowing population at Black schools rather than shifting some students to nearby, underutilized white schools. “It has become clear to me that the old bugaboo . . . of de facto [segregation] is a fraud,” US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Leon Panetta said in 1969. “There are few if any pure de facto situations. Lift the rock of de facto and something ugly and discriminatory crawls out from under it.”72
One striking example came in 1962, when RCSD sought to alleviate overcrowding at majority-Black School 4 on Bronson Avenue. The school board authorized busing four classes of fourth-graders to the nearby, mostly white School 44—but kept them segregated within that building rather than interspersing all the children together. Springer defended the arrangement, saying that students “were grouped by ability and achievement.” He then went further, claiming that advocates’ accusation of unequal education, rather than any differences between schools, threatened to have “a detrimental effect upon the aspirational levels of the children . . . in those schools.”73 The decision to keep Black and white students separate was protested by the Citizens’ Committee on School Integration and also by Franklin Florence, whose son happened to be among those affected. The School 4 students were “over there on loan just like a group of cattle,” he said. “And if [that] isn’t racial isolation in its ugliest form, I don’t know what is.”74
Another common response from the district when faced with overcrowding in mostly Black schools was the use of portable classrooms. Nowhere was this tactic employed more often than at School 3 in the Third Ward. The school board authorized the use of portable classrooms there four times in a seven-year period in the 1950s; on two other occasions it rented space at nearby churches. In 1963–64, 25 percent of the portable units in use in the district were located at mostly Black schools, even though such schools made up only 14 percent of all elementary schools in the city.75
RCSD built a number of new schools in the 1960s, both to accommodate the influx of Black migrant children and to replace its aging stock. All five of the buildings that opened from 1961 to 1966 were in areas of nonwhite population growth or adjacent to them, creating a prime opportunity to redraw attendance lines. Indeed, the district promised to do so. By the time the buildings opened, though, four of the five were deeply segregated—two with at least 90 percent nonwhite children and two with 99 percent. The problem was partly beyond RCSD’s control—the siting and racial makeup of the Chatham Gardens housing complex, for instance, was an unforeseeable complication—but in other places the cause was clear. School 6, for example, was built close to an established racial boundary, where a broad east-west swath of the Black Seventh Ward met up with a white section to the north. The School 6 zone was drawn to match the Black neighborhood, stretching widely from east to west. A student living just two blocks north of the school, meanwhile, would walk more than a mile to attend all-white School 36.76
The full picture of intentional segregative action is often, by its nature, buried in the monotony of monthly legislative meetings over the course of many years. Much of this evidence is nearly impossible to recreate from historical records—for instance, when an attendance zone line was changed but the specific details were not recorded in the board minutes. Happily, a thorough analysis of those actions in Rochester does exist, albeit in fragmentary form. It was completed by Jonathan Steepee, a University of Rochester graduate student working at the direction of Walter Cooper. Steepee’s analysis was apparently the basis of the local branch decision to organize the Aikens lawsuit. Infighting among local leadership and Cooper’s suspicions of President Quintin Primo resulted in Steepee’s study being misplaced and not used as evidence in Aikens. Cooper told national NAACP leaders he didn’t have a copy of the study to give to them, but somehow a partial, draft version of it ended up in the organization’s voluminous papers at the Library of Congress.77 Taken together, Steepee’s study along with the more easily accessible records present a robust picture of explicit school board and district action to create and maintain segregated schools.
In particular Steepee traced the development of placement patterns in accordance with the racial makeup of neighborhoods. The clearest case had to do with the opening of the new East High School building in 1959. Before then, East had drawn elementary students from Schools 9 and 14, both with large proportions of Black children, among others. When the new building opened, it lost both those schools from its feeder pattern and gained in return students from Schools 27 and 31—but not all of them. School 27’s attendance zone, for instance, was strictly split, with Black families living on the west side and mostly Italian families on the east side. The dividing line was the unassuming Hebard Street, just a third of a mile long. The next street to the west of Hebard was Scio, nearly 100 percent Black; the next street to the east, Union, was 100 percent white. When the school district reconfigured the attendance zone for its brand-new high school, the white students east of Hebard Street made the cut and the Black students to the west of it did not. A similar vivisection was performed on the School 31 attendance zone, with Black neighborhoods carefully excised.78
Both Robert Springer and his successor, Herman Goldberg, insisted that schools in Black neighborhoods received no fewer resources than those in white schools. In his 1963 report to the New York State Education Department, Goldberg pointed out that class sizes, building condition, and teacher training and experience were comparable across the two sorts of schools. Some of those points were debatable—class sizes in mostly Black schools were often smaller, for instance, because students with disabilities were overrepresented in them. But even those protestations of equality could not gainsay the clear historical record of official action to promote racial segregation in Rochester—the same sort of evidence that would eventually sway federal judges across the country and form the basis of desegregation orders in several northern cities. New Rochelle had been one such city, for example, and when Paul Zuber, the victorious attorney in that case, visited Rochester in October 1961 and saw the Steepee study, he declared it more compelling than what he’d been able to gather in New Rochelle.79 The crucial difference was that, in New Rochelle and other cities, the evidence had been put in front of a court. In Rochester, for a variety of reasons, it was not. As a result, the question of school district culpability was never seriously considered, either by a judge or by the public.
FIGURE 3.3. Attendance boundary for East High School before the construction of a new facility in 1959, with elementary school zones. Map by Alana Kornaker.
FIGURE 3.4. Attendance boundary for East High School after the construction of a new facility in 1959, with elementary school zones. Map by Alana Kornaker.
Shortly after World War I the Rochester Post Express ran a lengthy article under the headline: “Negro Exodus to This City Is Finished.” The subhead-lines shone with glee: “Many who came have gone back; experiment is a failure; homesickness and other factors keep them in the South now; no problem here.” From the perspective of southern Black people, the article stated, white northerners were “unfriendly” and Black northerners were “Yankee C——ns” who had “come under the education law” and failed to welcome the newcomers.80
For at least two generations, since the Great Migration began in earnest elsewhere, Rochester’s white (and, in some cases, Black) leaders had believed—had hoped, at any rate—that their community was somehow immune to the racial strife roiling other northern cities. They were aided in this delusion by the persistence of the migrant farm-labor market, which kept many poor Black farmworkers quarantined in Wayne County, and by harsh housing discrimination that kept those Black families who did arrive in Rochester out of respectable view. In schools as in the greater community, though, the issue could not be ignored forever. In April 1962 the Times-Union noted that the issue of de facto segregation in the city’s schools had been “long avoided by the board.” Two months later the Aikens suit made national headlines, “impugn[ing] the integrity and good faith of the community,” as the Democrat and Chronicle saw it.81 Now that the issue had received a public airing, there was no turning back.