Building a school - and a white enrollment

Originally published on May 16, 2004.

From the early 1900s, Pennsylvania's school code forbade the purposeful segregation of students. That did not necessarily stop those who ran the Philadelphia School District from doing it.

In the first half of the 20th century, all-black elementary schools were created - ostensibly to provide jobs for black teachers, who were barred from working in junior and senior high schools lest they instruct white students.

As neighborhoods changed color, some feeder boundaries were redrawn to keep the schools from changing color, as well. And into the 1960s, transfers were liberally handed out to white students who wanted to leave schools that were gaining African Americans.

But what many consider the single most blatant act of segregation occurred the year the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down.

In 1954, the district embarked on a project to build a high school in the city's rapidly growing Northeast section: a $20 million showplace to be called Northeast High School.

There was just one problem: Philadelphia already had a Northeast High School.

An institution with a long, venerable history of educating young men in the industrial arts, it was at Eighth Street and Lehigh Avenue. What had once been a thriving white neighborhood, however, was experiencing a rapid influx of African Americans, along with some Puerto Ricans. The 1947 graduating class had been less than 5 percent black; five years later, it was nearly 20 percent black.

Northeast's powerful alumni association lobbied the Board of Education (one of its own was vice president) to move the school, its history, its sports trophies, its colors, its faculty, its football equipment, and even its stained-glass windows six miles north to Cottman and Algon Avenues, amid new stone rowhouses and twins filling with white families.

Boys whose grandfathers had attended the old school - almost all of them white - were allowed to transfer to the new building. Almost without exception, those who were literally grandfathered were white.

The obsolete fortress that they left behind was renamed Thomas Edison High School.

In 1957 - the year the new Northeast High opened for 2,800 students - Anthony Lewis entered Edison. The bitterness there was palpable, he recalls, especially among black athletes.

"The new school had a case full of trophies that were earned by kids who were back at Edison," said Lewis, who is now managing director of the Housing Association of the Delaware Valley. "They couldn't even go look at them.

"[But] there was nothing that you felt you could do about it. You couldn't question the white man's decision."

Joseph Brumskill graduated from the old Northeast High in 1954. He did not find out about the plan to move the school until he returned for a reunion a year or two later.

"I'll never forget it," said Brumskill, who is now vice president of the Brandywine, Del., board of education. "[The principal] announced, and I'm paraphrasing here, that this is not the neighborhood that Northeast should stay in. He said it's not where we should be and not where we want to be. "

Brumskill, who like Lewis is African American, said that not every vestige of Northeast High could be transplanted:

"The school had a tremendous pipe organ, and it couldn't be moved. I heard complaints: 'We can take the trophies and such, but we have to leave the organ to those people.' I didn't speak out, but I did not go back."

After 30 years of wrangling about its location, a new Edison High School opened at Front and Luzerne Streets in 1988. The old Edison High School now houses the Julia De Burgos Middle School.