The very year Henry Elementary was born, 1908, Philadelphia School Superintendent Martin Brumbaugh ordered a "scientific investigation" into the "problem of the colored child."

His study addressed a troubling number of over-age black students in the system - without taking into account the wide practice of setting them back a few grades as they moved in from the South. Brumbaugh (later Pennsylvania governor) concluded that "the curriculum is entirely unfitted to capability."

An 1881 state law prohibited the creation of separate schools for black children, but that did not stop Brumbaugh. He declared that some were justified, all the more so because they provided the only teaching jobs in the city for blacks.

One of those schools was two miles from Henry Elementary, though in truth a world away. Henry served white children in the bucolic northwest end of German Township.

"There was a lot of discussion about building such an immense school, six rooms, in the wilds," noted one newspaper account, which referred to it as "Tilden's Folly," after the school board's building manager.

Yet wings soon sprouted to accommodate a burgeoning community with a dual identity as garden suburb and mill town.

Among the arrivals were African Americans, who, by the 1940s, made up one-tenth of the population in Germantown and the Mount Airys. Their children often went to all-black elementaries, but they were a growing presence in otherwise white Roosevelt Junior High. At Henry, seventh and eighth grades were added, eliminating the need for its students to go to Roosevelt.

Not until 1955, the year after the Brown ruling, did Henry come face-to-face with changing reality. Its attendance boundaries were redrawn, pulling in a pocket of mostly impoverished black students from jam-packed Emlen Elementary across Germantown Avenue.

"That got people worried," said Eve Oshtry, a longtime resident and Henry teacher. "It suddenly changed the makeup."

To prevent even more from coming, Henry parents asked the school board to restore the old lines. The board refused, but it did find a different way to deal with Emlen's overcrowding: parking six classroom trailers in its school yard.

The Philadelphia NAACP filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the board violated the Emlen students' constitutional rights. It was one of the first such suits in a Northern district in the wake of the Brown ruling, but although the judge told the board to come up with a desegregation plan, he put no enforcement muscle into the order.

A far more seismic force was rocking Philadelphia: real estate blockbusters with an arsenal of scare tactics, out to buy low from whites and sell high to blacks. Throughout Germantown, East Mount Airy, West Oak Lane, whole streets changed complexion almost overnight.

The speculators were busy in West Mount Airy, too, making harassing phone calls and slipping their cards into doors with the warning that blacks would be moving in and to sell now. But there they met legendary resistance from religious and civic leaders who quickly organized the West Mount Airy Neighbors.

Shirley Melvin, one of the charter members and now 79, recalls them contacting agents and threatening: " 'We have 600 members and a newsletter. Your name will be in headlines, and it won't be complimentary. ' They stopped."

When blacks bought homes on white blocks, the group prevailed on neighbors to host welcoming teas. And it opened an integrated day camp - thought to be the city's first - offering children art and dance lessons and adults a reason to mingle.

West Mount Airy emerged from the blockbusting battles about 60 percent white and 40 percent black in 1970 - "gracefully integrated," as Melvin put it. "People said, 'This is the way we want to live.'"

The ground had not held at Henry Elementary, however. By that year, less than one-third of its students were white.