History
Most Baltimore City public schools were not integrated until after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. However, in 1952 Baltimore Polytechnic Institute was forced to open its advanced college preparatory curriculum to African American students. This course was prestigious and was unusual for a high school at that time. The Institute's so-called "A" course included calculus, analytical chemistry, electricity, mechanics and surveying; subjects not offered at the black schools in the City at that time. The Institute was a whites-only school but supported by both white and black tax dollars. Consequently a group of 16 African American students, along with help and support from their parents, the Baltimore Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), applied for the engineering "A" course at the Institute. The applications were denied and the students sued.
The subsequent trial on the suit began on June 16, 1952. The NAACP’s intentions were to end segregation at the 50-year-old public high school. They argued that the Institute's offerings of specialized engineering courses violated the "separate but equal" clause because these courses was not offered in high schools for black students. To avoid integration, an out-of-court proposal was made to the Baltimore City school board to start an equivalent "A" course at the colored Frederick Douglass High School. The hearing on the "Douglass" plan lasted for hours with Dehuff and others arguing that separate but equal "A" courses would satisfy constitutional requirements and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall arguing that the plan was a gamble and cost the City should not take. By a vote of 5-3, the board decided that a separate "A" course would not provide the same educational opportunities for African American students and that starting that fall, African American students could attend the Institute. The vote vindicated the NAACP national strategy of raising the cost of 'separate but equal' schools beyond what taxpayers were willing to pay.
The African American population in Baltimore before 1954 was significant, and rose dramatically after the schools were desegregated. (Crain 1968, 72) This is not to say, however, that the desegregation of Baltimore schools went smoothly. There were many problems encountered along the way to a free and equal school system and society in Baltimore, Maryland.
Because of the rapid growth of the African American community in Baltimore, the schools became over crowded. Due to the over crowding of the schools, Baltimore decided to district the schools. (Crain 1968, 74) This means that if someone did not live in the district of a certain school, they could not attend that school. This was a way for the school system to remain segregated. African Americans and whites still lived in different areas of Baltimore, therefore, African American and white children went to different schools. Obviously desegregation had not taken full effect.
The Maryland State Department of Education put out a book on the progress of desegregation in 1961. The book has an over all feeling that all is fixed, and that nothing more needs to be done to further the cause of desegregation. This was obviously inaccurate, and displays the hardships that the civil rights movement encountered.
The Baltimore school system was accused of intentionally segregating schools through districting. (Crain 1968, 74) Many civil rights leaders protested this, and asked for reform in the system. The reform was slow, and is still being sought after today.
By 1968, the tensions between the African American and white citizens in Baltimore were high, and came to a head when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968. Riots broke out in Baltimore during the weekend of Palm Sunday. African American citizens were frustrated and angry. The 1968 riots were not exclusive to Baltimore. Many American cities had riots after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
The educational achievement of African American students in Baltimore would continue to lag behind that of their white counterparts, with a report in 1968 showing that the ethnic mix of areas, the influence of private education and the divide been urban and suburban areas affected outcomes.
Much has changed in Baltimore since the 1960s; however, Baltimore is still facing some of the same problems in its inner city school systems that Baltimore faced in the fifties and sixties. Most of the population in Baltimore city schools is still African American. These schools are over overcrowded, and under funded. Much still needs to be done to improve the quality and equality of the Baltimore city school system.
Read more about this topic: Desegregation Of The Baltimore City Public School System
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)