The opening of Girard College: Marches, rulings and the unlearning of prejudice

OWEN GOWANS was only 4-years-old when Cecil B. Moore, the fiery-tongued, flamboyant lawyer and civil-rights leader, led picketing for seven months and 17 days in 1965 outside the 10-foot stone wall that surrounded fortresslike Girard College.

Day after day, from May 1 to Dec. 17, marchers demanded that the North Philadelphia school - founded in 1848 for "poor, white, orphan boys" - open its gates to black boys.

Stephen Girard, a wealthy merchant and banker, died in 1831. He left millions to the city to establish the school. It occupies 43 acres on an enclosed campus at Girard and Corinthian avenues.

Despite the "college" in its name, it was a private boarding school for elementary to high-school boys, ages 6 to 18.

Moore, then president of the Philadelphia NAACP, was known as much for his colorful language and tough ex-Marine demeanor as his skills as a lawyer.

Girard, he said, was a "cesspool of bigotry and a shrine to segregation."

He argued that even some of the street-gang members he sometimes drew to the protests "could use that education," adding that they might not have been in a gang if they had had good schooling.

"Education and training, don't you think we need it?" he asked a reporter.

National leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins, national NAACP president, also marched at Girard.

Some 3,000 people came in early August 1965 to hear King speak of how "sad" it was "to stand in the city . . . that is the cradle of liberty but has a kind of Berlin Wall to keep God's colored children out."

Then, after 14 years of legal battles to break Girard's will, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling admitting black boys.

The year was 1968.

Owen Gowans was seven and entering second grade when he was one of the first four African-American boys to walk through Girard's gates that fall.

Now a manager in the training department at SEPTA, Gowans, 47, said that he did not know that day of the significance of walking through those gates.

Gowans' father died when he was 2. He recalled his mother, Audrey Small Gowans, "encouraging me that it [Girard] would be good for me, and I believed in my mom that everything would work out."

In a famous photo of the four boys, Gowans is on the right in a plaid jacket. The jacket is now on display at the Girard College Museum at Founder's Hall.

The other boys were Theodore Hicks, William Dade and Carl Riley.

"I didn't know until years later that this whole thing was a big civil-rights case," Gowans said recently.

He and his wife, Helena, live in Mount Airy and have a son, Marshall, 15, and a daughter, Morgan, 12.

He came to realize that "prejudice is a learned experience" because he got along fine with his classmates in second grade.

Plus, the school went out of its way to shelter him from negative experiences.

"It seemed that in every class, I had to sit in the front row, and I was always sitting either right next to the teacher or the house governess."

But he couldn't escape the anger that seethed among the older boys.

He remembers an incident during a chapel gathering.

"I was sitting on the aisle when I remember an older boy walked by and said, 'Nigger, go home.'

"That stuck in my head for a long time."

Years later, in February 1979, Gowans' mother once again asked him to do something for Cecil B. Moore.

She said that it was only right that he should attend the lawyer's funeral, at Mt. Olivet Tabernacle Baptist Church, in West Philadelphia.

He, his mother and his aunt were seated in an overflow room in the basement. Someone from Girard was supposed to speak, but had not arrived.

Gowans' aunt approached an usher to say that her nephew was from the school.

He had just turned 18 and was dressed in a red Girard sweater and a shirt and tie.

He was quickly led up a back stairwell to the pulpit where the Rev. Lorenzo Sheppard told him, "Don't be scared, son."

"There was no pressure," Gowans recalled. "I had no time to think about it."

Gowans spoke from his heart to nearly 2,000 mourners, including congressmen, mayoral candidates, most of City Council and a large contingent of state and federal judges.

"I am one of the first of four blacks to enter Girard College," he said that day. "I have been there 11 years and I will be graduating in June. And I want to thank Mr. Moore for all he has done for me."

He got a standing ovation. Women hugged him. Men shook his hands.

Cecily Banks, Moore's eldest daughter, said that the overwhelming response to Gowans' speech came because "it put a human face on the movement.

"One of the difficulties of any sort of protest movement is that the achievement of the goals often goes unheralded."

Most of the Girard protesters saw no direct reward themselves, Banks said.

"It's difficult for people to realize sometimes that there actually are beneficiaries to all the protests, and that there are people who got something as a result of all that work." *