In 1963 the Cincinnati Board of Education bussed several classes of students from their African American neighborhood in Evanston to the overwhelmingly white working-class neighborhood of Oakley several miles away. Nearly a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schools violated the constitutional rights of Black students, the Board of Education in Cincinnati created a completely segregated environment at Oakley School. The neighborhood white students were assigned to rooms staffed by the existing white faculty while the kids bussed from Evanston – all Black – occupied separate classrooms taught by Black teachers. This segregation extended to separate times in the lunchroom and on the playgrounds.
Tina Deal was an Evanston student bussed to Oakley. Her father sued the district in 1963, pointing out that his daughter was subjected to segregation instituted by the Superintendent of Schools. Mr. Deal demanded redress through integration of the city’s schools. The Cincinnati Board of Education launched a bitter defense, claiming that Cincinnati had a system of neighborhood schools. The reason Tina Deal was in an all-Black classroom, the district’s lawyer asserted, was because she lived in an all-Black neighborhood. That, the district argued, was Mr. Deal’s choice.
On its face the argument is absurd: in order to manage its neighborhood schools in a segregated city, the district bussed several classes of Black students across school district and neighborhood boundaries to a building in a white neighborhood which by school board policy segregated them from the white population. Yet the district contended that busing students across neighborhood or school district lines to achieve racial integration would destroy the city’s neighborhood schools. The national NAACP and its Cincinnati branch saw the Deal litigation as the dream case to open the North to court-ordered desegregation through busing. It is astonishing that Cincinnati’s Board of Education managed to maintain what it acknowledged was de facto segregation through the Civil Rights era, and indeed to the present day.
Following the twists and turns of the legal and political turmoil between the 1963 lawsuit and the resolution of the Deal case in 1969, and of the related Bronson case that dragged on through most of the 1970s, leads to a history of illegally or extra-legally, segregated Cincinnati Public schools dating back to 1887. Geoff Sutton is doing a series on this complicated story.
Current situation (February, 2025): The Board of Education has decided to repurpose the Evanston Academy building as a Jr High School (grades 7-8) beginning in the fall of 2025. Frederick Douglass School will be a K-5 school, with South Avondale being a middle school (grades 6-8).
Here are some articles describing the events:
“Grandson says Schools Remain Black”
How School Segregation became an Issue for the Board of Education in the 1960’s
Segregation in the 1960’s: Moving Classrooms or Moving Targets?
More to come!