History
The school began in 1916 with 283 students. By the 1970s, the student population had grown to over 3,300, though the enrollment has decreased since then.
In 1934, 1,700 Morgan Park students went on strike, protesting the presence of African-Americans in school classes, leaving only 58 students in school. Parents had met with the school superintendent demanding that classes be kept segregated.
Eventually the strike was settled and the white students returned to the integrated school. Frank Sinatra visited the area to support integration during the strike and encourage the students return to the school.
Read more about this topic: Morgan Park High School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)