During the 1970s and ’80s the battle cry of segregationists in the North was opposition to “forced busing” to accomplish racial integration. Such busing never occurred in Cincinnati. But busing to maintain segregation was common in our city during the 1950s and early ’60s – and it brought Black students from many neighborhoods to Walnut Hills.
The segregated Black Frederick Douglass School, a fixture in our neighborhood from 1870 onward, accepted students from any neighborhood. During the early twentieth century it was the only Cincinnati public school with a Black principal and faculty. Around 1920 the Black Harriet Beecher Stowe School opened in the West End. In-migration during and after WWII – a second wave of the “great migration” of the twentieth century – increased the Black population in our city. “Slum clearance” and highway construction demolished many units of housing in the old population center of the West End. And throughout the 1950s, the babies boomed in every demographic group. All of these things put pressure on the de facto segregated public schools in our city.
An early 1950s housing project in the Cumminsville neighborhood called Millvale, just west of Mill Creek, was planned as a racially integrated low-income community with a school building sized for the housing project. As the apartments filled, white families did not choose to move there, and the African American children in the burgeoning baby-boom had nowhere to go to school.
In the 1954-’55 school year the school board hastily repurposed the old Walnut Hills High School at Ashland and Burdett as the Burdett Elementary School. The large building was located just a few blocks away from Frederick Douglass. This conversion from high school to elementary school came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s May 1954 Brown v Board of education outlawing segregation in public schools. The earliest classes at Burdett Elementary included a racially mixed group of students from the Walnut Hills and Evanston neighborhoods. A newspaper feature about students at Burdett sending birthday and get-well cards to president Eisenhower in 1954 includes photos of a few children – some of them white and some Black. A 1956 “Kindergarten Round-up” interestingly invited families to meet at Hoffman Public School in Evanston to sign up not only for Hoffman and the recently converted Burdett, but also for two Catholic schools – St. Francis De Sales school a few blocks from Hoffman, and Holy Angels in O’Bryonville.
Yet from its beginning in the fall of 1954, the area around Burdett housed an increasingly Black population. Within a few years – the timing is hard to follow – busloads of Black students traveled from the Millvale development in Cumminsville to Burdett in Walnut Hills. This transportation of students from one neighborhood to a school in another quite distant neighborhood in the mid-1950s – when both of the neighborhoods were de facto Black – leaves no evidence of racial protest.
The students from Millvale were able to return to an expanded school in their own neighborhood in the fall of 1958. During that school year, Black students were bused to Burdett from Avondale, again sending these students across school district boundaries. From that time forward, School Superintendent Wendell Pierce explained in 1960, Burdett was “used to relieve other crowded districts.” Transportation from Avondale, just west of Walnut Hills, represented a less arduous journey than the buses from Millvale, but it still involved busing Black students outside their normal attendance district. As the Black population in Evanston boomed – the neighborhood bordering Walnut Hills on the northeast “flipped” from white to Black within the single decade between 1955 and1965 – Burdett absorbed students from that neighborhood.
But even Burdett did not provide enough seats for the growing Black community in Walnut Hills, Avondale and Evanston. As we have seen, the school district in 1963 bused about 100 Black students from Evanston to the Oakley neighborhood – and placed the bused Black children in classrooms segregated from the white children already attending the school. The community finally protested. Only that act of explicit segregation in a single school building brought a strong enough case to sue under the rules and customs a decade after Brown v Board.
— Geoff Sutton