In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled in in Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka that segregation violated the rights of African American students and families. Segregation in the South became known as “de jure” segregation – segregation by law. Children from the same neighborhood were assigned to different schools based solely on race. That, the Supreme Court ruled, violated the rights extended to Black citizens in the Civil-War era by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Segregation also disadvantaged African American communities in the North. Unlike the pattern in the South, whites in the North usually imposed a more geographical “color line.” In Cincinnati, boundaries on maps – mortgage and insurance “redlines,” school district attendance zones, municipal limits of “sundown towns” and even a “Blue line” outlining the distribution of magazines – divided Black and white neighborhoods. This “de facto” segregation – educational segregation in fact, but ostensibly not by law – became the legal cause for Civil Rights in the North during the 1960s, as “de jure” segregation had been in the South in the 1950s.
The most important test case in our city’s battle over educational integration after Brown came in the Evanston neighborhood just east of Walnut Hills. Walnut Hills had had a significant African American population from before the Civil War; in contrast, Evanston had grown up in the first half of the twentieth century as a primarily white, mostly Catholic working- and middle-class neighborhood. The “red line” between Walnut Hills and Evanston had been drawn along Victory Parkway, built in the 1910s and ’20s. But between the mid-1950s and the mid-’60s Evanston “flipped” from a white neighborhood to a Black one.
The public schools in Evanston could not accommodate all the students in their attendance areas. The district chose to send about 100 African American students from the neighborhood to a majority white building. While the closest (white) neighborhood school was Hyde Park, the Superintendent’s office opted to bus the classes to the more distant Oakley School in a working-class white neighborhood with a more hostile racial environment. The students from Evanston were placed in their own segregated classrooms in Oakley, with Black teachers; white children from the neighborhood all had white teachers. Lunch periods and recess times were staggered to avoid any “mix of the races.”
Several parents in Evanston requested transfers for their children from Oakley to Hyde Park – a school much closer to Evanston, with higher academic standards. The request was denied first by the individual schools, then by the Superintendent’s office, and finally by the Board of Education. The parents saw the situation as a clear case of de jure segregation: their children were bussed to a distant school; they were forced into segregated classrooms and social settings. Yet the Board denied it was practicing de jure segregation. Instead, the system argued that it was defending the Black students’ rights to a neighborhood school experience with other students from Evanston, taught as in Evanston by Black teachers. As soon as space was available, the Board asserted, the children would be returned to a neighborhood school in Evanston.
The Cincinnati NAACP took the case to court under the name of Evanston resident Tina Deal, demanding relief from the segregationist solution imposed by the Board of Education.
– Geoff Sutton
