In 1963, Wendell Pierce, superintendent of the Cincinnati Public Schools transferred 4 classrooms of African American students who lived in the Evanston neighborhood to Oakley School. The displaced pupils were completely segregated in the otherwise overwhelmingly (more than 85%) white building. When the Black community protested, the superintendent insisted that it was school policy to maintain such “intact classrooms” during the first year of reassignment of students from one school to another.
This previously unwritten policy – which we might call ex post facto (“after the fact”) – had some flimsy precedent. When the public schools had occasionally rented space from other organizations to solve a problem of temporary under-capacity or over-enrollment, the public-school students did stay in intact classrooms. One example involved a transfer of a few classrooms of public-school students into a nearby Catholic school. The public-school classrooms were taught by public-school teachers, in classes separate from the parochial students.
But that example was a simple matter of the rental of space from the Church; it seems a stretch to see this as a precedent for moving classes from one public school to another. Nevertheless the hastily announced “policy” allowed the system to justify the “de facto” segregation of Black students for at least a single year. The Cincinnati branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), with the support of the national organization, joined the Evanston parents in a lawsuit demanding redress, filed under the name of one of the transferred students, Tina Deal. Long negotiations between the school system and the Black Cincinnatians began under court supervision.
It was clear that the school board needed to build a new school, somewhere, to accommodate the growing student population in the Evanston, Walnut Hills, and south Avondale neighborhoods. Students from Evanston attended not only Evanston and Hoffman schools in their own neighborhood, but also Burdett School in Walnut Hills, just to the west. Everyone understood that building a new school was a two- or three-year project. (In the event, it was not until 1970 that the new Parham School opened in Evanston.)
In order to continue the segregation of “intact classrooms” at Oakley, the superintendent first suggested that in the fall of 1964 those 1963-64 Black classrooms would be moved back to Evanston. He hoped that a new cohort of Black children from Evanston would be moved into new, segregated, “intact classrooms” in the white school. That prospect was a bridge too far even for the Cincinnati School Board. In September 1964, the Black students whose education had been disrupted by the 1963-64 school year transfer to Oakley were in fact integrated into Oakley classrooms. There was not a lot of newspaper coverage of the “mixed” classrooms in Oakley beginning the 1964-65 school year. Yet the Facebook page of the alumni of the long-closed Oakley School tells that story – in class pictures.
In this social media stroll down memory lane we can see the briefly changed complexion of the Oakley student body. The class pictures posted are of course a random sampling based on what happened to survive and become digitized. But we can see a striking change from one Oakley third grade class in 1963 to a fourth grade in 1964 and a fifth grade in 1965.
It is interesting to note that the random pictures posted by former students also show that immediately after the two integrated classes moved through the grades, Oakley’s classes returned to the almost uniform whiteness of 1962.
More to come.
– Geoff Sutton