Chapter 5

“WELL-TRAINED CITIZENS AND GOOD NEIGHBORS”

Educating an Integrated America

On April 26, 1971, Bernard C. Watson of Temple University offered the keynote address at the West Mount Airy Neighbors’ thirteenth annual meeting. A scholar of urban education and former deputy superintendent of planning for the School District of Philadelphia, Watson spoke of the challenges facing the city in public education. “If we cannot deal openly and honestly with the problems,” he said, “we had better be prepared to be run over by them. Time is short, and the road is tough, but it has to be traveled. If not us, who? If not now, when?”1

Watson spoke of the choices that individuals make every day in how they respond to the problems within a community. West Mount Airy residents had chosen to react to racial transition with concerted campaigns promoting genuine interracial living, said Watson; their commitment to maintaining the viability of local schools, however, had waned in the face of local, citywide, and statewide battles over how best to manage the immense Philadelphia school district. Parents who professed tolerance and liberalism were withdrawing legitimacy from public education. “The fundamental problems in the schools,” he urged, “have not been, and are not being, addressed by these sorts of individual decisions…What people want from the schools differs from person to person, community to community, and the result is conflicting demands, diverse expectations, and constant pressure on school officials.” According to Watson, the quality of education must be the responsibility of the community as a whole. Residents of West Mount Airy, he said, have to decide that education is worth fighting for. People cannot wait for citywide improvement; “self-interest is not only alright, but may be the only thing you can trust.”2

In many ways, the early efforts toward residential and social integration in West Mount Airy were successful in spite of economic pressures and formal policy directives aimed at perpetuating segregation on a structural level. WMAN integrationists had embarked on an interventionist grassroots movement to overcome what many viewed as the natural tendency toward residential separation. But while community leaders saw tangible results from efforts toward block-by-block integration, many residents struggled to contend with conflicting ideas concerning the value of education and city, state, and national policies that were often at odds with local efforts. The successful negotiation between local autonomy and external support in the realm of neighborhood integration did not translate to the realities of urban public education in the decades following the Second World War. What began in the mid-1950s as a hopeful campaign to integrate neighborhood elementary schools had become, by the early 1970s, a desperate plea for local control over an increasingly precarious educational climate.3

When West Mount Airy experienced its first rumblings of residential transition in the early 1950s, the neighborhood was served by two elementary schools. Charles W. Henry School and Henry H. Houston School offered local children a quality public school education for decades with little turmoil. Built in 1908 and 1926, respectively, both schools were overwhelmingly white through the middle of the twentieth century. As African American families began to move into the community, though, the school demographics shifted rapidly, significantly faster than the neighborhood itself. The Henry School, at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Green Street in the center of the integrating core, experienced this change particularly acutely. Because the first African American families tended to be wealthier black professionals purchasing larger homes with more land, it was the sprawling region around Henry that saw the demographic swing first. The Houston School, surrounded by more densely populated blocks and smaller row homes, did not experience a significant transition until the late 1960s.

These striking shifts in student population resulted both from new black residents moving into the area and from official redistricting initiatives by the Philadelphia Board of Public Education. In 1953, the Henry School was home to four hundred white and ninety-five black students.4 That same year, in an effort to cope with changing residential patterns in northwest Philadelphia’s sixth district, a subsection of the larger city school district, and to ameliorate early hints of overcrowding at some local elementary schools, the school board transferred nearly two hundred children to Henry.5 Although some of these new students were residents of the community, the vast majority came from adjacent neighborhoods. Nearly all of these new transfers were lower-income black students from the Eleanor C. Emlen School at the corner of Upsal and Chew streets on the Mount Airy/Germantown border.6 The policy brought sudden changes to both the racial and economic landscape of Henry’s predominantly middle-class population. By the end of the decade, as the racial dynamics of the school shifted and the overall population grew, enrollment of white students plummeted to 35 percent, and by the middle of the 1960s, there were 275 white students at Henry and 560 African American.7

Henry School parents protested the redistricting plan, arguing that the new boundaries “would be injurious to the school.”8 But their cries were met with little acknowledgement from the school board. As soon as the 1953 policy took effect, Henry’s student body was transformed, and class sizes increased dramatically. In WMAN’s estimation, the potential consequences of this rapid transition were dire for both the elementary school and the community at large. As new black students moved to Henry, the organization feared, white families would begin withdrawing their children. While initially such a scenario would result in the school operating under capacity, the WMAN Education Committee warned, quickly “there [would be] substantial gains in student population…and this increase [would be] almost entirely a Negro increase.”9 More broadly, board members believed, segregated educational facilities would threaten the very core of the residential integration that neighborhood activists had been working so hard to maintain. Not only would the schools lose the coveted resources that came with the investment of middle-class white families; WMAN leaders feared the loss of white families from the neighborhood altogether.10

Though West Mount Airy Neighbors had expressed internal anxieties about this potential loss of white families in the community, in their public pleas the group framed their arguments around concerns for the recently enrolled students from the redistricted zone. One of the fundamental issues facing the Henry School, the Education Committee said in a November 1959 report, was that the new boundaries had introduced students who were ill-equipped to handle the academic rigors of the school. “The boundary extension several years ago,” they reported, “has brought in a large number of students from a small corner of the zone who, because of economic and educational background, are not able to keep up with the majority of the students in the school.”11 Several members of WMAN approached the Board of Education informally, inquiring about the prospect of relocating some of the Sharpnack students at Henry back to the Emlen School to conform with the pre-1953 boundaries.12

In response, school superintendent Allan Wetter told the community group that he would consider the relocation plan, provided that he could place the responsibility for such action on West Mount Airy residents. If he shifted students, he said, he needed to be able to make it clear that he was doing so in response to pressure from WMAN and the Henry Home and School Association. In a subsequent exchange, Wetter reiterated such sentiments. The board will recommend six new portable classrooms at Emlen and new district boundaries lines, if, as Schools Committee chair Henry Wells recounted at an April 1960 meeting, they receive “a strong letter from WMAN urging it and asking for a meeting with him to press him further for it.”13 The group considered the superintendent’s offer. Many members believed that it was in the best interest of the community as a whole to remake the elementary school in the image of the neighborhood. But not everyone on the board agreed.14

Citing the already overcrowded conditions at Emlen, George Schermer firmly opposed the measure. Local integration should be a goal only insofar as it does not create discriminatory conditions elsewhere, said the Human Relations Commission president. This type of short-term solution, he cautioned, would only increase tensions in the larger northwest Philadelphia community. Matthew Bullock, who went on to serve as WMAN’s first black president in 1961, agreed with Schermer. He believed that Henry could serve as a sort of “beacon of light” for the community, but he questioned the ethics of sending children back to the Sharpnack area school. Emlen is a “disgraceful situation,” said a third board member, well beyond physical capacity and operating with an established precedent for shuttling white children within its boundaries to other schools. “We still have a responsibility of balancing issues,” he implored. Still others expressed unease about “looking out for our own interests at the expense of others not in a position to look out for their own.”15

Although rarely part of public or institutional conversations, the question of WMAN’s responsibility to the surrounding region underlay many of the decisions the organization made. When the group began its campaign to drive out corrupt realtors from the area, a number of the offending agents resettled in adjacent neighborhoods, exacerbating the rate of transition and intensifying patterns of flight.16 Although some members of the WMAN leadership acknowledged the need to consider the impact of their efforts on other parts of the city, for others the impulse to protect and preserve West Mount Airy as a vibrant, economically stable community took precedence over the potential consequences of their actions for those outside of the neighborhood. In education, resource allocation, and institutional muscle, the ongoing vigilance within West Mount Airy had profound effects on the stability of the larger northwest Philadelphia.

In the 1959 boundary dispute, Schermer and Bullock held firm in their conviction that the stabilization of the Henry School could not come at the expense of students from neighboring communities. Thus, the WMAN Schools Committee abandoned the proposal to redraw district boundaries and relocate the Sharpnack students, and called instead for the school board to undertake a comprehensive study of the Sixth District. The group sought analysis of the region’s six elementary schools and two junior high schools in order to assess all potential improvements in concert. The goal, WMAN mandated, would be to foster integration throughout the district.17 As the committee later wrote in a follow-up report, “[We wanted to] obtain optimum classroom conditions for all schools, regardless of racial composition, with the firm conviction that out of the optimum educational environment [would] come well-trained citizens and good neighbors.”18 The board accepted the new proposal, and during the fall of 1960 it set out to examine the demographic trends facing the district.

In July 1961, WMAN issued a report analyzing the school board’s findings. The information, the group said, confirmed what they had suspected: the institutions making up the Sixth District of the Philadelphia School District were experiencing marked demographic shifts as a result of both administrative redistricting and rapid changes in the residential landscape of the neighborhoods. Henry was in the running for the greatest turnover. The group’s findings echoed the conclusions of a similar study around the country: on a percentage basis, there were more black students in the public schools than black families in these integrating neighborhoods.19

In a familiar pattern that community leaders had established in their earliest exploratory meetings about the prospect of residential integration, the group took a measured approach to this data, assessing the various explanations for these larger trends. WMAN at first focused on the city’s policy of intradistrict school choice. It was possible, the committee wrote, that there were students from outside of the neighborhood enrolling in local schools.20 Although children in the Philadelphia School District generally attended the elementary school that served their immediate community, from its inception the Board of Education had adhered to a policy whereby students could request a transfer to another institution. Though some opted to take advantage of this open enrollment program for the sake of convenience or because of a prior connection to a particular school, most saw the policy as a means through which to attend schools with stronger teaching staffs, better funding, and superior equipment. More often than not, those schools also had majority white student enrollment.21 In practice, however, few families took advantage of the policy. According to Board of Education reports, in 1960 approximately five thousand of the district’s 245,000 children, or roughly 2 percent, were attending schools outside of their neighborhood boundaries.22 Though the proportion was higher in the Sixth District, even there only 7 percent of students—approximately thirteen hundred in total—lived outside of the district’s boundaries, not nearly enough to account for the dramatic disparity in overall district enrollment. WMAN concluded that it was not worth their energy to attack the long-standing policy.23

Instead, returning to the strategy of Myrdalian moral suasion that had served to stabilize the community in the middle of the previous decade, WMAN chose to focus organizational resources on enticing individual families to send their children to Henry School. To combat the demographic trends in the Sixth District, the board determined, integration had to be actively fostered within the schools. Board members thought that if parents in the neighborhood took proactive measures to bring the commitment of residential integration into the elementary school, they could stave off both the panic that was beginning to take hold among white families and the perceived potential negative consequences of racial transition for the school itself. Integrationists believed that they could rely on the same tactics that had been so successful in the realm of residential stability to achieve educational stability. Through grassroots efforts, they maintained, they could extend their strategies in dealing with white flight to local schools, so as to offset the effects of the larger structural forces and city-mandated education policies.24 What community leaders failed to realize was that these early initiatives geared toward stabilizing Henry were strikingly similar to the early neighborhood policies toward integration. They focused on individual choice at the expense of structural change, and, as such, their efforts ultimately resulted in the same shortcomings as the Church Community Relations Council.

Under Marjorie Kopeland’s leadership, the Henry Home and School Association (HHSA) implemented programming designed to bring neighborhood families, black and white alike, into the schools. The organization called on parents to donate time, money, and skills to draw the community together and supplement the support from the school board.25 HHSA member Don Black served on the committee to hold a school fair. Others used personal and professional connections to bring in local television and radio stations to cover their efforts. Within four years, the school was operating at physical capacity, and students enjoyed access to a gymnasium, an auditorium, home economics and shop facilities, and a central library. “It was really fun,” Black later recalled, “because everyone participated.”26

Around the country, urban, middle-class professionals were pooling individual resources to protect their local schools. In Washington D.C.’s Takoma neighborhood, parents affiliated with the integrationist community organization Neighbors, Inc. spent money on construction materials and donated their time to build new classrooms. It was easy, parent Janet Brown later reflected. “Here we were, college educated people in striving families with well-disciplined children. We all had the same interests and the same values [about education].”27 This sense of optimism led families to believe that with enough individual contribution and community effort, they could ensure the viability of local schools.

To support and facilitate this new interventionist approach to school stabilization, West Mount Airy residents saw that it was time to usher in new leadership at the Henry School. In 1957, following the influx of Emlen students and the early threats of white exodus to local private and parochial schools, the HHSA and WMAN board members Marjorie Kopeland, Bernice Schermer, and Matthew Bullock led a drive to petition the school board for a new principal at Henry. “Principal Hargraves wasn’t able to cope with [the changes],” Schermer remembered. “He was a very fine gentleman but it was more than anyone would be able to handle without preparation.”28

The newly appointed principal, Beatrice Chernock, saw it as her mission to recraft the culture of the school. A slight white woman with a short shock of black hair, Chernock believed that as a strong leader, she could help to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a stable, integrated school. The new principal sought to bolster the spirits of the entire Henry community: students, parents, and teachers alike. She developed new school-wide programming and instituted “D-Days,” or dress-up days, where children were required to come to school in ties and dresses.29 Chernock adopted a philosophy of dignity and security, hoping to boost morale by instilling in the students a sense of decorum that she believed had been lost in the years of transition.

The principal’s agenda went beyond strengthening morale, however; soon after she arrived at the school, she began a coordinated campaign to recruit white families from the neighborhood, seeking to convince them to send their children to Henry. “You have no idea what I went through that first year,” Chernock was reported as saying. “The neighborhood had just begun to integrate. My white parents were running like frightened chickens! With a few sensible white parents, I organized a group to visit homes and sell the values of integration. I talked to realtors about our wonderful schools. I got publicity for us.”30 In both public campaigns and conversations with individual families, Chernock invoked the ideas of the Church Community Relations Council, summoning the language of middle-class respectability to convince them that her school would be carrying on the lessons that their children were learning at home, that she could instill such respectability in loco parentis.

Lois Mark Stalvey, a white woman who moved with her family from suburban Omaha to Philadelphia in the early 1960s, settled in West Mount Airy because of its reputation as an integrated community. “We moved into our new house on June 18, 1962, after the schools had closed [for the year],” Stalvey wrote in her 1974 memoir, Getting Ready: The Education of a White Family in Inner-City Schools. “As soon as our phone was connected, it rang.” It was Beatrice Chernock on the line, and she was calling to introduce the Stalveys to the local elementary school. The principal spoke of dedicated teachers and a dynamic Henry Home and School Association. She highlighted advanced teaching techniques and the high quality of the families sending their children to the school. “I was impressed with a principal who used her vacation to welcome all the new parents to the neighborhood,” Stalvey wrote, unaware at the time that Chernock’s list was largely limited to Mount Airy’s white residents.31

The Stalveys had already decided to send their three children to Henry. When Lois arrived at the school for registration that September, the principal escorted her past the lines of African American parents and offered her a private tour of the facilities and her choice of first-grade teachers for her oldest son. They visited classrooms and met with students and teachers, and when they returned to registration, Chernock asked, “Have you noticed how our school is rebalancing itself racially? Fifty percent of the younger students are white” (original emphasis).32 Stalvey did not realize that this speech was being repeated countless times to white parents around the neighborhood.

Chernock’s policies aimed at allaying the fears of white parents had serious consequences for the school’s African American population. As the principal directed her resources toward recruiting white students and ensuring that they had a satisfying experience at Henry, many of the school’s black students, particularly those who had arrived following the 1953 redistricting plan, fell victim to lower tracking, an inattentive administration, and, at times, physical mistreatment. Some members of the Henry School community condemned these practices, which served to coddle the school’s white population. Stalvey expressed discomfort with such policies, and several parents charged Chernock with creating racial tensions within the neighborhood. As kindergarten teacher Eve Oshtry later reflected, “There [was] some resentment on the part of some people who [felt] that you shouldn’t bend over backwards too far for this and you shouldn’t give special privileges to white families or special inducements for them to come.”33

Similar problems, of course, existed in public school systems throughout the country. Deeply ingrained racism continued to pervade American thought across geographic and socioeconomic lines. Though the nation was looking at the problem of racial inequality with an increasingly critical eye, individuals and institutions were often not able to escape the culture of racism that had been normalized in the United States for centuries. Even West Mount Airy, a community so intentional in its efforts to defeat a system of racial hierarchy and create a genuine interracial society, could not break free from the entrenched bigotry. Bowing to the pressures of maintaining a white presence at the school, Chernock and her staff, perhaps subconsciously, granted special treatment to the minority of white faces in the hallways while relegating many of her black students to second-class status.

Still, the efforts of the HHSA and the policies that Chernock implemented at Henry did serve to stabilize the community in the early 1960s. By 1961, the school had balanced out to approximately 70 percent black and 30 percent white.34 Though the numbers were not reflective of the overall population of the neighborhood—in 1960 roughly 15 percent of West Mount Airy residents were African American—the transition appeared to have stalled as families began to reinvest in local public education.35 For a brief moment, it seemed as though integrationists in the community had successfully stemmed the panic and halted the rapid transformation at Henry School.

But these individual efforts were not enough to overcome the institutional mandates of the Philadelphia Board of Public Education. In the early 1960s, the board once again implemented new redistricting initiatives and set updated class-size guidelines; between the fall of 1962 and the fall of 1964, enrollment at Henry swelled. Over those two years, the population of white students grew by 70 percent, while the African American student population expanded by 165 percent.36 Even as the school was, as Chernock had boasted proudly to Stalvey, beginning to recalibrate, the institution could not support its expanding student body. By the end of 1964, Henry, constructed at the turn of the century as the city’s first modern fireproof school building, was operating out of sixteen permanent classrooms and four temporary units.37 During the previous two years, the school’s population had expanded from 590 to 835 students.38 Whereas the earlier instability at Henry stemmed more from the fear of transition than from actual depreciation in quality, the district initiatives in the middle of the 1960s brought concrete changes to the classrooms. The teacher-to-student ratio soared, special activities were eliminated to accommodate growing class sizes, school personnel were increasingly overworked, and desks and books and equipment began to fall into disrepair as the school struggled to provide for the influx of students.39

HHSA president Robert Rutman believed that these numbers would only continue to increase. According to his projections, 25 percent of the homes in Mount Airy were owned by young families with more children than the previous occupants.40 In effect, said Rutman, the current enrollment figures, which had briefly stalled, represented a skewed sense of stasis. Realistically, he believed, within a few years the population would slant toward a younger mean and median age and an increased ratio of children to adults. “Accordingly,” Rutman wrote to C. Taylor Whittier, school board superintendent, in the fall of 1964, “the overall prospects are for continued enrollment which exceed the Board of Education standards…. This situation cannot but adversely affect the school and severely limit the opportunities for improvement.”41

According to newspaper reports, by the end of that year Henry had become the most crowded school in the Sixth District, itself the most crowded district in the city.42 In one-third of the school’s classes, more than forty students crammed into the overflowing rooms. The classroom ceilings and stairwell railings were crumbling. There was a widespread teacher shortage. Students seeking to enroll were being turned away. The district was renting space for the school from the Germantown Jewish Centre and Summit Presbyterian Church, but they needed a more permanent solution.43 In a proposal put forth to the Board of Education, WMAN called for district support for the expansion of the Henry School grounds. The report emphasized that the neighborhood had successfully alleviated the problems associated with racial transition through an effective interdependent effort by a committed parent base and an innovative faculty, but it noted that the swelling student body was endangering the precarious balance that the community had achieved. “The increases in enrollment,” the WMAN Schools Committee wrote, “have placed a severe strain on the school and have caused some curtailment of essential educational activities. The conservative projections for the future leave no doubt as to the danger to both the school and the community. Failure to counteract this danger can be expected to destabilize both school and community.”44

WMAN and the HHSA launched a campaign to convince the board to expand the school’s budget and build additional classroom facilities. They called for the addition of twelve permanent classrooms to be constructed on two adjoining lots. Applying a combination of threat and flattery, the organizations sought to garner support for the school’s middle-class base. Although some members of the school board thought that these demographics meant that Mount Airy required less institutional backing, the community groups argued that, in fact, the neighborhood’s economic makeup entitled the region to greater assistance for what residents brought to the district as a whole.45 In a 1963 WMAN statement on the district’s budget, the school subcommittee had linked the city’s tax base to the very residents sending their children to Henry School. “To a great extent,” the committee wrote, “the schools of Philadelphia are being financed by real estate taxes collected from the more desirable areas [of the] the city.” The report went on to implore the board for additional funding, arguing that the integration efforts in the neighborhood and the local institutions that supported them could not be sustained unless the district allocated to them the resources necessary to keep their schools competitive with the adjacent suburbs. “If integration fails in Mount Airy,” the report concluded, hinting at the ominous demise of the community without district support, “the Board of Education will witness an extension of that creeping process of social and economic blight, overcrowding of housing, overcrowding of schools, and decrease in tax values of real estate on which the school income is derived.”46

Throughout the young history of West Mount Airy’s integration project, community leaders had relied on a coordinated collaboration with governmental agencies and institutions in order to preserve and maintain the character of the neighborhood, racially and economically. These relationships were critical to the community’s success; the careful balance of internal control and external support had created the structure for stable integration. When the quality of the schools began to erode, WMAN attempted to employ this same model to raise standards and restore the standing of Henry School throughout the city. Mount Airy residents wanted a neighborhood school supported by district resources. The Board of Education, however, operated under a different model of organization and policy implementation; this external management by the board shifted that equilibrium, and the grassroots liberalism that had worked so well in the community’s early efforts at creating residential integration began to break down as local organizers fought for control over neighborhood schools.47

In the years that followed, Mount Airy community leaders sought to prove to the school board that it was in the district’s best interest to provide the necessary support for the elementary school. By the mid-1960s, the neighborhood had become a nationally recognized model of a successfully integrated community. Liberal organizations around the country looked to West Mount Airy as an ideal worthy of emulation, an example of what racial justice could be. Through this publicity, Philadelphia, too, had gained positive attention. Accordingly, WMAN believed, the Board of Education could not ignore them.48 Mount Airy residents inundated Superintendent Whittier’s office with letters and phone calls, urging him to consider the school’s unique potential as a model of successful racial integration. The neighborhood’s population had expanded precisely because parents were attracted to the prospect of an integrated community, they reminded him. But this influx of new young families brought with it the need for increased institutional support. “The neighborhood strongly desires that the school maintain its high quality of education so that [it] can continue to serve as an attraction for people of all races,” wrote WMAN president Louis Levy. Without the district’s assistance, said Levy, the potential existed for the momentum to shift in the efforts toward stabilization.49

Such sentiments echoed a letter that HHSA president Rutman had submitted to the school board months earlier, imploring the committee to consider taking over a large property adjacent to the school, where a local realtor had applied for a zoning variance to build an apartment house:

The Henry School has the good fortune of remaining a key point of attraction in the entire school system. Certainly this attractiveness, which offers a proper example for the other schools in our district and in the city, cannot be sacrificed lightly without engendering serious questions as to the underlying educational philosophy…Can citizens and community organizations be expected to seriously participate in the solution of urban education if their efforts are not cultivated and assisted by the school system?50

Rutman’s statement was a clear indication of the tension between the desire for local control and the need for citywide support. Even though WMAN pushed for community autonomy, it required institutional resources and assistance in order to keep the neighborhood integration project from collapsing. A year later, in 1966, the board heeded local complaints, approving a permanent annex for Henry School on Carpenter Lane, at the site of the previous zoning variance.

These increased efforts on the part of WMAN to court the assistance of the school board came during a moment of radical transformation for the Philadelphia public school system. In 1965, the city passed a new home rule charter that shifted fiscal control from the state legislature to the city school district. The legislation reduced the school board from fifteen members to nine and called for seats to be filled with people with fresh energy. Superintendent Whittier struggled with how to implement these new initiatives, and in 1966 he resigned from his post. Calls for district support from West Mount Airy parents were passed on to his successor, Mark Shedd.

Shedd, a graduate of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, had cut his superintendent teeth in Englewood, New Jersey. His mission when he had arrived in the integrated Manhattan suburb five years earlier was to stabilize a district up in arms over a state-mandated desegregation plan. His success at managing the transition in Englewood and avoiding racial agitation gave the Massachusetts native a national reputation in school reform; by the end of his tenure there, every school in the Englewood district had seen black enrollment figures between 38 percent and 50 percent of their total populations.51 Still, many questioned whether Shedd was equipped for the larger and more volatile Philadelphia district. As the Philadelphia Tribune reported, Shedd was “leaving a position where there [were] only 4,000 school children out of a population of 28,000 and [taking] over a system that has 270,000 pupils in 256 schools with close to 20,000 professional and non-professional employees.”52 But former Philadelphia mayor Richardson Dilworth believed he was ready. Shedd came to Englewood “amid racial turmoil and tension,” said Dilworth. He worked hard there to bring black and white families together to find quick and meaningful solutions to the growing racial divide. “He’s dedicated,” the politician continued, “and he knows how to get things done.”53 In 1967, Shedd came to Philadelphia to become the highest paid public official in the city.54

In his first year in office, the new leader crafted an agenda so comprehensive and innovative that it prompted journalist Henry Resnik to write, “Philadelphia…seemed to be well on the way, more than any other American city, to coping successfully with the failures of urban education.”55 Shedd proposed a plan to redefine the relationship between the city and its schools. With an eye toward racial integration and a drive for improved quality across the district, the superintendent worked to create what he termed a “Model School District,” bringing Philadelphia residents into conversation with the Board of Education and calling on them to make decisions about what should take place within local schools. As Shedd wrote in an open letter published in the Philadelphia Tribune:

New channels must be set to involve the community and satisfy it…. So what we are really talking about when we use the word ‘responsiveness’ is creating an open, trusting, and accepting climate for human relationships: a tolerance not simply for race or religion, but a respect for ideas, feelings, and concerns of those above and below in the school hierarchy and those outside it. Without this climate the unlocking of talent and the mobilization of resources needed will simply not be possible.56

Shedd’s push for local control of schools raised broader questions about the nature of community within a large urban metropolis. As WMAN made clear in both its bylaws and its brochures and mailings, the physical space supported by the organization was bounded by Wissahickon Creek to the west, Germantown Avenue to the east, Cresheim Valley Road to the north, and Johnson Street to the south.57 The area east of Germantown Avenue became known as East Mount Airy. In 1965, when East Mount Airy Neighbors was formed, the organization drew its eastern border at Stenton Avenue. In imagining the community as this confined entity, East Mount Airy Neighbors was able to regulate the activities within its internally defined borders, without contending with the region just to the east of Stenton, a neighborhood known by official designation as West Oak Lane that went on to experience rapid white flight and economic downturn in the late 1960s.

By naming their neighborhoods and drawing concrete geographic boundaries, community leaders could craft a sense of identity within those walls. Although socially, politically, occupationally, or religiously, residents could, by choice, engage with members of other communities around the city, it was only through the educational system that broader segments of one neighborhood would come into contact with broader segments of a separate neighborhood, often beyond the control of the individual students and parents involved. In this way, educational communities at times differed from neighborhood communities; where parents sent their children to school was largely dependent on how the school board drew its boundaries.58 In Philadelphia, the continual shifts of district lines within, around, and through residential communities made it impossible to maintain a sense of cohesion among homeowners and a sense of demographic control over local schools. Thus, as West Mount Airy Neighbors tried to manage the progress of the Henry School, the organization could not avoid the larger issues facing the Philadelphia public education system and the city at large.

Map 2. Street map of West Mount Airy. Prepared by David Ford, assistant director, Temple University Social Science Data Library.

In 1966, as one of the final initiatives of Whittier’s term, the school board put forth two new proposals to deal with the problems of overcrowding in the city’s public schools. That year, Henry was chosen for inclusion in a pilot program that would convert selected kindergarten-through-eighth grade elementary schools into K–4 institutions.59 The plan included new construction of additional facilities that would serve grades five through eight. The initiative, meant to alleviate congestion in neighborhood schools, was offered as an alternative to the board’s earlier failed attempts to implement a mandatory busing system.60 Residents in West Mount Airy worried about the destabilizing effects that the initiative would have on Henry. Though transforming the K–8 school into a K–4 would ease many of the capacity issues, it would also bring in an entirely new—likely poorer and blacker—population from outside of the neighborhood boundaries. Parents feared that another period of transition would push the precariously integrated institution beyond the point of recovery.61

As the community began to mount a campaign to protest the proposal, though, their attention was quickly redirected. In July of that year, the school board informed the HHSA of its interest in acquiring through eminent domain six additional properties adjacent to the schoolyard on Sedgwick Street for an additional play facility and increased parking for the faculty. Sedgwick, one of the most organized blocks in the neighborhood and one of the most stable, quickly rallied to halt the district’s plans. More than one hundred residents signed the circulating petition. The project was unnecessary, local homeowners maintained, in light of the likely conversion of Henry School to a K–4 facility. And even if the pilot program did not take off, they continued, the newly constructed annex would provide ample space for a yard and parking facilities, as it negated the need for the four temporary trailers that had been occupying the grounds.62

Moreover, petitioners argued, it would be a step backward to break up such a thriving block community. “These homes do not represent urban blight,” one resident wrote, “but rather middle-income housing whose owners, together with the remainder of Sedgwick Street, exemplify the city, state, and national goals toward democratic living.” A decade before, as the Church Community Relations Council was just getting off the ground, the Sedgwick Neighbors Association had provided an example on a microlevel of what the larger organization hoped to accomplish for the whole of West Mount Airy. The block, by 1966, was well-integrated economically, racially, and religiously, populated by lawyers, teachers, cabdrivers, salesmen, and city employees. Many of the homeowners sent their children to Henry and even those who did not, petitioners maintained, served as an example for the students who looked out onto the block adjacent to the schoolyard. “The unusual harmony of this street provides the school children of Henry a dramatic lesson in living and working together,” the signers concluded.63

Ultimately, neither the K–4 plan nor the Sedgwick proposal came to fruition, but these threats, both to the school and to the neighborhood, fostered increasing anxiety among residents and families as they struggled to maintain stability. The apprehension took its toll on the Henry School community. Parents worried that the day-to-day experiences of their children were being compromised. Some white students reported feeling physically threatened by their minority status.64 Teachers struggled to maintain a sense of continuity. Gradually, the tangible problems of underfunding and over-enrollment, paired with this looming concern over institutional change, prompted many West Mount Airy families to reevaluate their commitment to the public school system.

Though Mount Airy parents had a long history of sending their children to the area’s several prominent private and parochial schools, through the 1960s neighborhood enrollment at these independent schools spiked.65 At Germantown Friends School, which opened its doors in 1845 to provide a progressive coeducational foundation for Quaker children, the number of enrolled K–12 students from the 19119 zip code swelled from 178 in the 1956–57 academic year to 253 in 1967–68.66 At Chestnut Hill Academy, an all-boys college preparatory school, enrollment from 19119 climbed from thirty-eight in 1955–56 to sixty-seven in 1967–68.67 Though these two schools attracted different demographics of students, both were drawing new families from West Mount Airy, who were leaving local public schools in search of a sense of security for their children.

Historically, these private institutions in the area largely catered to a white constituency. However, in the years following the Second World War, middle-class black families from West Mount Airy began seeking admittance for their children, and by the mid-1960s a number of the schools saw rising applications from African Americans. In 1948, Joan Cannady became one of the first black students to enroll at Germantown Friends School.68 The oldest child of an upwardly mobile African American family who had moved to northwest Philadelphia in 1944 and to West Mount Airy in 1951, Cannady began kindergarten at the Emlen School in 1945. When she was in second grade, she later recalled, she and her best friend were punished for reading ahead in their schoolbooks. Cannady’s father, a mathematics teacher at Bok High School in the city’s Germantown neighborhood, was enraged by what he saw as Emlen’s overall approach to education. His longtime friend, a teacher at Germantown Friends, encouraged him to speak with admissions personnel at the school.69 The Germantown Friends School, which had received censure a decade earlier from Raymond and Sadie Alexander for its refusal to admit minority students, sat down with the Mount Airy parents.70

Cannady became the first black student to enroll in the elementary school at Germantown Friends, and the first to graduate from the upper school, in 1958.71 For several years, she was the only African American student at the Germantown Friends School. By the mid-1950s, though, other children of color were beginning to trickle in. According to school yearbooks, in 1959 there were five black students in grades seven through twelve. By 1967, there were upwards of twenty.72 That same year, Chestnut Hill Academy had six black students, nearly all of elementary school age. In 1965, Norwood Academy, an all-boys K-8 Catholic school in the city’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood, had as many as half a dozen African American students enrolled, up from zero prior to 1961. Many of these black children attending area private schools were coming from the 19119 zip code.73 Although the actual numbers were small, the larger trends are telling; by the mid-1960s, middle-class residents of West Mount Airy, black and white alike, were growing disillusioned with the Philadelphia public school experience.

Witnessing this retreat from local schools, the WMAN board once again grew concerned about the impact of educational instability on the viability of the larger community. In the spring of 1968, the Schools Committee undertook a new study to understand why local families were leaving public schools. Results echoed the concerns that families had brought before the school board earlier in the decade; surveys indicated that parents were frustrated by the large class sizes and the lack of personal attention.74 They spoke of inadequate equipment and facilities and noted that their children were not feeling sufficiently challenged.75 Some worried that by sending their children to Henry School, they were setting them up to be ill-prepared in college and the professional world. As one Jewish mother reportedly remarked, “[Non-Jewish white parents] can afford to be liberal. My kids need the best education I can afford. They’ll have plenty of job discrimination when they grow up.”76

Although community leaders saw many of these concerns as legitimate, at a basic level the WMAN board believed that parents simply lacked sufficient information about what was taking place at Henry School.77 As Lois Stalvey later wrote, many white parents believed that black students were aggressive. Some were concerned that their children would pick up poor grammatical tendencies from black teachers. Others worried about lice, about slang, about bullying. Principal Chernock suspected that white parents also harbored significant fear about the prospect of interracial dating, an issue that by the late 1960s occupied an active presence in the public imagination.78

In 1967, in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of whether a 1924 Virginia antimiscegenation law violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall held that the freedom to marry is a basic right in American society. “To deny this right on so unsupportable a basis as racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment,” wrote Marshall, “is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”79 Though the legal implications of the decision were felt only in discrete areas of the country, the cultural ramifications reverberated across America. A new consciousness was beginning to emerge; white parents around the country, who had not previously considered the possibility that their children may marry outside of their own race, suddenly feared placing their daughters in close proximity to black youth.80

Three months later, Americans witnessed what Ebony magazine described as “the unprecedented interracial marriage involving the highest ranked American public official in history,” when eighteen-year-old Margaret Rusk, daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith.81 Rusk was white; Smith, African American. The event prompted editorials and articles in publications throughout the country. The September 29 cover of Time featured a black-and-white photo of the couple as they left the Stanford University chapel following their ceremony; the headline read “Mr. & Mrs. Guy Smith—An Interracial Wedding.”82 The corresponding article spoke of the marriage as a symbol of racial tolerance. “In a year when blackwhite [sic] animosity has reached a violent crescendo in the land,” the magazine reported, “two young people and their parents showed that separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to the marriage of two minds, color should be no impediment.” Following that utopian vision of color-blind liberalism, however, the piece chronicled the widespread censure that the couple had received, the hundreds of critical calls and letters that were inundating the State Department, and the concern over the possible impact of the relationship on President Lyndon Johnson’s bid for reelection the following year. For many, the wedding seemed to highlight a growing anxiety over interracial romance and, even more distressing, the children that could result.83

On December 11 of that year, this cultural unease became fodder for a new drawing room comedy from Columbia Pictures. Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner featured a young white woman who arrives at her parents’ house with the news that she is engaged to the African American doctor whom she met on vacation. The award-winning film, which grossed nearly $57 million domestically and was named by Variety in 1968 as the eighteenth-highest-grossing film of all time, portrayed the exact situation that Henry School’s Beatrice Chernock believed many Mount Airy residents feared: the white, liberal parents of the bride-to-be, who had raised their daughter on the principles of equality and justice, struggled to come to terms with the prospect of a black son-in-law.84 Ultimately, Spencer Tracy, as the distraught father, gave his blessing to the union, leaving the audience to consider what they might do in the same situation. At Henry School, administrators attempted to alleviate concerns by temporarily suspending the school dance program for seventh and either graders, but, recalled Chernock, the policy did little to quell such fears.85 For parents of students in their final years at the elementary school, the question of interracial romance also highlighted new concerns: What would happen to their children when they graduated from Henry and had to navigate junior high and high school outside of West Mount Airy?

As officials at Henry struggled to maintain a sense of stability, eight miles away at the school board offices Mark Shedd and his team were working on a plan to decentralize the district, allowing for greater local control and community input. In the midst of cries for black power in Philadelphia, the fall of 1967 saw growing agitation in schools across the city. For several months, the Black People’s Unity Movement had been organizing for greater representation, increased resources, and intraracial solidarity and empowerment among black youth. Though members of his administration were wary of relinquishing control, Shedd believed that by bringing local residents into the conversation, he could quell the demonstrations and avoid further confrontation.86

The superintendent’s concerns proved prescient. At 12:30 p.m. on November 17, more than thirty-five hundred black students from as many as twelve city high schools converged on the main administration building at 21st Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in the northwest corner of Center City. The students had staged walkouts earlier that morning from schools in Germantown, North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia, and many marched through the city with gold “Black Power” buttons pinned to their chests.87 At first, Shedd invited protest leaders into the building to negotiate. For nearly two hours, the groups deliberated on matters of curricular representation and school reform. But talks were interrupted when Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo dispatched 111 officers, dressed in full riot gear, into the crowds.88 By the end of the day, fifty-seven protestors had been taken into custody and upwards of thirty students, twelve officers, and twenty-seven bystanders had been treated for injuries.89 Though negotiations failed that afternoon, in the weeks and months to follow Shedd reaffirmed his commitment to negotiation and rehabilitation. The superintendent sought to work with black students and their parents, both to ameliorate tensions and to usher in tangible reforms in neighborhood schools. The board created ad hoc committees for curricular development and race relations and worked to pass legislation swiftly.

Still, the earlier standoff between the school board and protestors and the subsequent clash with police spread outward to animate racial hostilities among students at integrating and transitioning schools across the city. With the increased focus on racial empowerment and separatism, schools in the Sixth District became sites of acute tension as students, parents, and administers struggled with how to negotiate the changing cultural landscape. In West Mount Airy, even parents who remained committed to keeping their children in the public elementary schools were becoming increasingly anxious about the prospect of academic life after Henry.

Figure 6. Police officer grabs protester at November 1967 school board demonstration, Philadelphia Bulletin. Used with permission from Germantown Jewish Centre, Philadelphia.

Germantown High School, which served the Sixth District elementary and junior high schools, saw a primarily African American student body emerge by the late 1960s. Because many of the white—and black—middle-class families in the region took advantage of the educational alternatives available to them, enrolling their children in one of the many secular or religiously affiliated college preparatory schools in northwest Philadelphia or applying to one of the city’s prestigious magnet schools, Germantown’s students were often less academically prepared and from less economically stable families. The school struggled with widespread gang activity and rampant teacher turnover.90

One of the feeder schools for Germantown, Leeds Junior High was experiencing swift white flight in the waning years of the 1960s, and the attendant turmoil spilled over to impact the whole of northwest Philadelphia. A white ethnic enclave that had sprung up in the post–World War II years, the neighborhood surrounding Leeds had had the potential to be a “great neighborhood,” reported the Philadelphia Tribune in 1972.91 Like West Mount Airy, West Oak Lane was within the city limits but sheltered from the rush of downtown. It offered dependable public transportation and a close-knit community, and it was bound by parkland that seamlessly blended the neighborhood with Germantown to the southeast and the inner-ring suburbs to the northwest. Though transition started slowly in the middle of the 1960s as the first black families began to move east, by 1970 the community had decidedly tipped. Mount Airy parents, just a few miles away, looked on as white flight took hold, particularly concerned with the impact on the neighborhood’s schools.

As West Oak Lane native Jeff Zimmerman later recalled, “There was a sense of trepidation amongst the adults in the neighborhood that blacks were moving closer to the area. They didn’t know what to expect, but they had a sense that it wasn’t anything good.” Zimmerman, who grew up on the 8500 block of Michener Street and attended Leeds from 1967 to 1969, remembered a rising sentiment of fear throughout the community. “There were police around all the time…. More and more stores began installing bulletproof glass in their windows…. My friends and I didn’t want to walk around by ourselves at night anymore.” By the end of the decade, Leeds Junior High was suffering the trying effects of the educational instability that such residential upheaval brought with it. “The school became a tough place in the late 1960s,” Zimmerman reflected. “There was a real growing sense of animosity…. When we were in elementary school, we were all friends, black and white…[but] by junior high, people didn’t trust each other.”92

In 1967, several classrooms at the junior high school were vandalized. When four black students were arrested three days later, one teacher kept her white students in class during recess, warning them that they might get hurt on the playground. A black West Mount Airy resident, who sent her daughter to Leeds, reported that the same teacher, an African American woman, had told her primarily black class, “It’s your kind of people who cause all the crime in the city. You make it harder for decent Negroes.”93

Three years later, racial antagonism erupted at the school once again. On the morning of Wednesday, April 8, 1970, a black student at Leeds reportedly assaulted a white eighth grader. According to one witness, a teacher who had watched the episode unfold turned and walked away. Later that day, reported the Philadelphia Bulletin of the bystander’s account, “a group of black youth, not students from the school, went through the corridors roughing up white pupils.”94 In response, the paper said, several white teenagers drove past the school that afternoon, shouting racial epithets and waving guns at younger black children. The following day, older African American students at Leeds formed a “protective unit” around those who had been threatened.95 By the end of the week, members of the Philadelphia branch of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), described by the Bulletin as a militant organization that had formed in the city a year earlier, invaded the school to defend the minority of white, predominantly Jewish, members of the student body. The national JDL had been founded in New York City in 1968 with the expressed intention of protecting American Jews around the country “by any means necessary.” At Leeds, the activists—five adults and four students—took over the school office for more than an hour and unsuccessfully attempted to commandeer the building’s public address system. As the Bulletin reported, they sought “to dramatize what they called a need for greater protection of students from violence.”96 The principal reportedly locked himself in his own office and refused to come out. Later, all five adults involved, including the JDL’s administrative director, a Spanish teacher at Olney High School, were charged with disorderly conduct.97

These incidents of violence and turmoil in the Sixth District had significant implications for West Mount Airy parents wrestling with whether to send their children to Henry School. A week after the JDL episode, a group of one hundred parents and students gathered at the Grace Episcopal Church in East Mount Airy. “We can’t send our children to school and be sure they’ll be safe there all day,” said moderator Aaron Silverstein. Silverstein recounted for the crowd the steps taken by the Leeds administration to safeguard against further violence within the school. Following the April incident, he said, the district established a special security force made up of ten guards to patrol the halls. But, Silverstein lamented, the force was set to remain in place only so long as the principal deemed their presence necessary, and they would be removed if the school board felt that they were more urgently needed elsewhere.98 Those in attendance at the Grace Episcopal meeting sought a greater institutional commitment to protecting the Leeds student community. Many feared that the instability in the secondary schools would seep into the local elementary schools. Others worried about the decision they would have to make once their children graduated from Henry; they questioned whether their commitment to integration should eclipse their concern for their families.

Of course, some parents held firm to the belief that maintaining a white middle-class presence in the schools was critical to the integration project and to the larger fight for racial justice. “If [my children’s] being there helped make things better for [poorer black students]…it was worth it,” Lois Stalvey later wrote of her steadfast commitment to keep her three children enrolled at Henry.99 Superintendent Shedd, too, sent his children to Germantown High School. For others committed to residential integration, though, the structural problems of the education system forced them to reconsider how far they were willing to go in their efforts to create an interracial society. As historian and Mount Airy resident Dennis Clark later reflected, many parents “[were] willing to put themselves on the line in different ways, but they [were] not willing to gamble with their children.100 Such sentiments were commonplace in these intentionally integrated communities by the late 1960s. Marvin Caplan, cofounder of the Washington, D.C.-based Neighbors, Inc., moved his younger children out of the neighborhood elementary school once he learned that his older daughter felt bullied and alienated as one of the few white students in her class. Caplan had at first been willing, he said, to “sacrifice [my] children for [my] beliefs,” but he reconsidered when he saw the impact those beliefs were having on their lives.101

By 1970, even as Mount Airy’s residential integration remained stable, the crisis of confidence over neighborhood schools had resulted in dramatic declines in enrollment. According to urban planner Leonard Heumann, that year more than 63 percent of white parents and 32 percent of black parents of elementary-school-age students in West Mount Airy reported sending their children to private schools or to nonlocal public schools. Even more striking, 93 percent of parents of white high-school-age students and 36 percent of their black counterparts were sending their children either to private schools or to special magnet schools within the district.102

And then, on Monday, February 1, 1971, a shot rang out that many later said killed any hope for public education in Philadelphia. Samson Freedman, a longtime Leeds teacher and member of the West Oak Lane community, who had decried the actions of the JDL a year earlier, had just entered the Leeds schoolyard when fourteen-year-old Kevin Simmons approached him.103 At 3:00 p.m., Simmons raised a .45 caliber handgun, reportedly yelled, “Look out, y’all,” and pulled the trigger, shooting the fifty-six-year-old ceramics teacher once in the head.104 Two days earlier, Freedman, a card-carrying member of the Philadelphia NAACP and the president of the interracial organization Northwest Neighbors, had punished Simmons with detention for cursing in the hallways. Leeds was the eighth school that Simmons had attended in nine years. His parents moved frequently, his grandmother later told reporters, “to try to do a little better for their children.” The boy transferred to Leeds a year earlier, following an incident at his previous school when he was struck by a teacher. Simmons’s father had gone to the school later that day threatening to kill the offending faculty member. Officials called the police, and Simmons looked on as his father was led away in handcuffs.105

According to newspaper accounts, Simmons returned to Leeds the day after Freedman had issued the detention to steal the dreaded pink slip that would have sent him to the local reform school. When the ceramics teacher caught him, he took Simmons to the principal’s office. The student left soon after and went looking for Freedman.106 He only wanted to scare him, Simmons later said.107

A collective wail arose around the region. Freedman’s death marked a historic event in Philadelphia; it was the first time in the city’s history that a student had shot and killed a teacher. Superintendent Shedd made the unprecedented decision to close all city schools the following day in memory of the slain educator. Newspapers featured the story for days after the incident. Everyone mourned the loss of a beloved member of the Leeds faculty and a long-standing leader in the transitioning neighborhood of West Oak Lane.108 Many called the teacher’s violent death a senseless tragedy—senseless, but perhaps not surprising. Around Philadelphia, people seemed to understand that Samson Freedman’s murder was part of a larger battle for the very survival of the city. And while communities offered varying explanations for the causes of the crisis, everyone seemed to agree that Philadelphia was quickly losing ground.

The Philadelphia Tribune reported that Freedman was a leader in his community, trying to bring peace and stability to the ever-changing landscape of West Oak Lane. The paper quoted Bertram Bernard, a community activist and longtime friend to Freedman, who described the incident as a three-car collision. Freedman was in the first car, said Bernard, and Simmons was in the second. The school district represented the third. The accident began with the district striking Simmons from behind. Simmons, in turn, skidded into Freedman.109 Wrote one Tribune columnist, “Mr. Freedman was not the victim of a gun but the victim of a cold, selfish, and decaying system. Was the expulsion of that boy who is accused of death, and the expulsion of many more disturbed children, the answer to a nation of unwanted and disturbed youth? White Racism, Black Selfishness, and overall Greed. These are the culprits that created the conditions for the death of Samson Freedman.”110 Many mourners pointed to a broken educational system and entrenched cultural and structural racism as the root causes of the violence at Leeds. Although Simmons may have been the catalyst, they said, Freedman’s death was a product of deeply embedded institutional problems that needed to be addressed.

East Mount Airy Neighbors board member Gisha Berkowitz described the shooting as an explosion. “I think both are victims, Samson and the boy,” Berkowitz told reporters. “The incident is a total breakdown in education and human relations. Even if it is just a matter of a sick kid, it is a sign of a serious problem.”111 West Mount Airy Neighbors quickly released a statement urging the community to remain calm. “We are…aware of those who would exploit tragedies such as this to disrupt the quality of life in Mount Airy and the general community,” WMAN president Oliver Lancaster said. “We call on all our neighbors to take a calm, rational approach to facing up to the many problems that have existed and will continue to exist, should we be swayed by emotion rather than reason, by fear rather than determination.”112 Lois Stalvey, too, saw Simmons as the victim of larger systemic inequality. “[He was] a human bomb,” she later wrote, “triggered by other teachers, [who] had killed someone who was trying to help.”113 She believed that the root of the problem was a decaying system that would let a young black man fall through the cracks.

For many other whites around the city, though, this blame was misplaced. The Philadelphia Bulletin reported that the crime evidenced the growing unruliness of black youth. There will be a “crescendo of panic,” predicted Cedarbrook Area Neighbors president Edward T. Feierstein. “We have been working so hard to stabilize the community and a fourteen-year-old dumps all our efforts into the garbage truck.”114 To some fearful white families, this explanation was too generous. Freedman’s murder by a young African American troublemaker proved what they had believed all along: black kids were violent and aggressive. They could not be trusted.

Samson Freedman’s death marked the end of any hope of an integrated educational system for many Philadelphians. “This killing has made all of our work for the school go for naught,” said William Carter, West Oak Lane Coordinating Council president. “Now there will be a howl for a complete police state in the school, and under the circumstances, what can you say?” Michael Feinman of the Mount Airy Community Action Council (a neighborhood organization focused on stabilization in West Oak Lane) called the event a turning point for the Philadelphia School District. “It has been one violent occurrence after another at Leeds,” said Feinman. “Leeds is eighty percent black this year. Next year, with parents concerned about the safety of their children…,” he reportedly trailed off.115

The years following Freedman’s death brought a marked decline in elementary school enrollment for the Philadelphia School District, from 171,324 in the 1968–69 school year to 143,432 in 1975–76.116 In West Mount Airy, the 1970s saw educational resegregation rates climb, aided, too, by a budgetary crisis and teachers’ strike that left local elementary schools in a state of turmoil that community leaders could not assuage. By the 1972–73 academic year, more than three hundred students from the 19119 zip code were attending Germantown Friends School, an increase of more than fifty students in five years. At Chestnut Hill Academy the numbers had swelled as well, from sixty-seven in 1967–68 to roughly ninety in 1972–73 and more than 110 in 1973–74.117

By 1979, as WMAN celebrated its twentieth anniversary, more white parents than ever before were choosing not to send their children to Henry School. “For all their apparent liberalism,” Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter Howard Shapiro wrote, “a large number of parents do not put their money where their mouths are. They put it, instead, in private schools. Some critics say these are the very people whose support could greatly enhance public education.”118 For WMAN, the impact of Freedman’s murder was emblematic of the organization’s inability to manage the local schools amid larger institutional and cultural forces. But perhaps more significant, the response of community leaders to the crisis was reflective of larger threats to the neighborhood’s viability. By the early 1970s, residents of West Mount Airy were struggling with how to adapt to widespread political, economic, and social changes to the country’s urban landscape, as established community leaders worked to maintain the postwar liberal ideal on which they rested their integrationist mission.