Originally published on May 17, 2004.

Through much of the last half-century, the struggle for school integration played on public stages, from the country's highest courts to streets choked with tear gas.

It goes on still, but in places such as Nancy and Kevin Peter's West Mount Airy living room, amid antiques and touches of Ikea, chardonnay, and the upstairs echo of children's laughter.

Here the Peters convene the Henry Group, about two dozen parents who have made the same, admittedly difficult decision: to send their sons and daughters to the local public elementary school.

They are mostly white and middle class. The school is mostly black and increasingly poor, with strained resources and test scores above average in one grade, well below in another.

Even in a city neighborhood with a fabled pride in its diversity and an indelible streak of 1960s idealism, parents of any color with the means to choose do not often choose Charles W. Henry Elementary.

The Peters' efforts to recruit them yielded nine families this year - seven white, one black and one biracial - for a K-8 school of 550 students.

"It's not about integration per se," says Nancy Peter, whose son is a Henry kindergartner. " It's about enriching what we have here so it benefits all. If we had a park that nobody liked, and the only people who used it were those who didn't have the means to leave, wouldn't the neighborhood get together to improve the park?"

But a school?

"I've heard it many times" from parents, Kevin Peter says.

"'We can't sacrifice our own kids for the cause.'"

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down legally mandated school segregation in its epochal Brown v. Board of Education decision, public education in America is not the model of integration once predicted. Not anywhere near.

In the story of Henry Elementary - a potentially perfect mixing bowl of races and classes - are some of the knottiest reasons why.

"You want your kids to go to school in a world that has different people and you want them to get a really good education," said Shelly Yanoff, a social activist who sent her children to Henry 30 years ago and still lives in West Mount Airy.

"There has always been a feeling that if it couldn't happen here, you couldn't make it happen anywhere."

Since the Brown ruling, forces with a big pull on parents' minds have swept around and through the brick schoolhouse on a hillock at Greene Street and Carpenter Lane.

The blockbusting panics of the 1950s and '60s.