Shortridge High School - History

History

Shortridge has a long and interesting history. It was established as the Indianapolis High School in 1864 as the state’s first free high school. Abraham C. Shortridge was recruited from Ohio to become school superintendent in 1863. Shortridge was a strict educator when it came to drilling students and faculty alike. However, he was innovative in many ways, including the hiring of female teachers and the admission of African-American students. By 1878, Shortridge High School served 502 students.

The school was the lightning rod for civil rights almost from the beginning. At its inception it was primarily white. In 1903, in a football game with Wabash College, Wabash coach Tug Wilson substituted an African American left tackle by the name of Samuel Gordon. The Shortridge team captain led his team off the field after a scene. Gordon kept his sense of humor, noting he was sorry the game was called on account of darkness.

In 1927, a segregated all-black school, Crispus Attucks High School, was opened by the Indianapolis Public School system, in part to address the rising black population at Shortridge High. In the late 1920s, Shortridge High School ceased to be a neighborhood school. In 1928, the school moved from downtown Indianapolis into its current location at 34th and Meridian Streets on the north side of Indianapolis.

The Depression of the 1930s was not kind to the country, and this was seen at Shortridge as well. The PTA was active in raising money for both the school and its students. A radio production studio was established in the late 1940s, and WIAN-FM, licensed to the IPS board, went on the air in 1955. By the late 1950s, Shortridge was ranked among the best schools in the nation, according to Time Magazine. The American Field Study (AFS) foreign exchange program was established as the first of its kind in Indianapolis. This program continued until the school was initially closed in June 1981.

In the late 1950s, the school began to lose good academic students to other schools, notably the newly opened North Central High School on the far northside. An attempt to make Shortrdge an all-academic college preparatory school was adopted in the late 1960s, to try to restore racial balance. In 1968, the “Shortridge Incident” involving black students and local civil rights activists occurred.

The 1970s were spent defending the school from closure and scrapping the all-academic program. The school had largely returned to being a neighborhood school at the time it was closed in 1981.

While minority students had attended Shortridge from the very beginning, it was chiefly a white school until 1927, when the Indiana state legislature passed its first desegregation laws. During that period, much of Indianapolis felt the effects of the Ku Klux Klan's presence in the city. While the high schools were segregated by custom, the construction of Crispus Attucks High School as an all-African-American school created segregation by rule. Prior to the passing of the Federal Fair Housing Laws in 1968, black high school students who lived in an area where they could attend either Crispus Attucks High School or Shortridge High School were able to choose which school they wanted to attend. Many of these students chose to attend Shortridge High School and contributed greatly to the school's academic and athletic life. Black students who lived within the Shortridge district were also free to attend the school, and they too contributed greatly to the school's academic and athletic life. During the 1950–1970 period, the racial demographics of the Shortridge district began to change rapidly (e.g., the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood, a part of the Shortridge district, changed from 82% white to 20% white). During this time and until its initial closing in 1981, Shortridge changed from an almost-exclusively white school to a predominantly black school.

In 1957, a Time Magazine article named Shortridge as one of the top 38 high schools in the US. As early as 1959, some on the PTA supported gerrymandering the Shortridge district to find a better racial balance at Shortridge. By 1964, some felt that ‘the Shortridge problem’ had reached a crisis. That fall a protest march from the school to Indianapolis Public School (IPS) offices was supported by 200 students. By 1965, the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners turned Shortridge into an all-academic high school, beginning in the 1966-67 school year. An entrance examination was required for enrollment. In the 1966-67 school year only 272 freshmen enrolled, 46% of whom were black. Though efforts were made in the next four years to increase enrollment, they were not effective in the long run. The 1966 elections saw the school board change, including the loss of Richard Lugar, a Shortridge graduate and academic plan supporter, who ran for Mayor of the City of Indianapolis. By 1967, a new school board voted 5-2 to abolish the short-lived ‘Shortridge Plan’.

In 1968, the United States Department of Justice filed a suit charging de jure segregation in Indianapolis. IPS responded with a desegregation plan which addressed only one of the three underlying charges. In 1971, US District Judge S. Hugh Dillin judged the Board of School Commissioners to be guilty of de jure segregation. The next 20 years would include an experimentation in busing and the eventual closing of Shortridge High School in 1981. The facility reopened a few years later as a Shortridge Middle School. Finally in 2009, it was converted back to high school status as a magnet program focusing on law and government studies.