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The Bolling v. Sharpe Supreme Court decision of 1954, decided on the same day as Brown v. Board of Education, deemed the racial segregation of District public schools unconstitutional.
In the years that followed, local and federal officials attempted to facilitate racial integration at several all-white District schools, including John Philip Sousa Junior High School, where the Black plaintiffs in the landmark civil rights case attempted to enroll their children.
However, those efforts didn’t amount to much according to Carlene Thompson, a Ward 7 resident who attended Sousa Junior High School more than a decade after Bolling v. Sharpe.
“The class photos we took were all Black,” said Carlene Thompson, 72. “If there were any white students, I didn’t see them.”
Thompson, a Sousa student between 1966 and 1968, remembers what she calls the school’s family-oriented atmosphere, much like she had at home with her six siblings, father and later her grandfather.
“The teachers took to me like a mother or father,” Thompson told The Informer. “They helped me grow. That’s what kept me interested in school.”
During the 1967-68 school year, Thompson transferred to Hart Junior High School in Southeast to finish out her eighth grade year. That’s where she said she first encountered white youths, and even white administrators, in an academic setting.
Though she and her white classmates got along well, Thompson said that the spring 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and riots that subsequently broke out across the District, and other U.S. cities, diminished any dreams of a multiracial utopia.
“The white kids were scared of the Black kids [and] the white principal was trying to get the white kids out of there,” Thompson said. “I didn’t see any more of them. I’m not sure if he stayed long after that either.”
Young People Discuss School Integration, and a DCPS Alumna Looks Back
May 17, 2024 marked the 50th anniversary of the Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education decisions.
In the decades following the abolishment of de jure school segregation (segregation mandated by law and enforced by the government), the phenomenon took on a new life as families of means, color notwithstanding, jockeyed for the District’s more well-resourced, academically rigorous schools. At the same time, other schools, particularly those in the eastern part of the District, became under enrolled and underfunded– a battle ever present to this day.
Despite the launch of sixth grade academies and other enrichment programs at once struggling District schools, and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s (OSSE) facilitation of an annual school enrollment lottery, some families still feel mired in a web of educational inequity that, in some respects, mirrors what they see on the streets and in their homes.
Last year, rumors about the closure of what’s now known as Sousa Middle School compelled students, teachers, faculty, parents and alumni to attend a school boundary and student assignment meeting that the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education hosted.
Sousa Middle School, like other schools located east of the Anacostia River, faced low enrollment that jeopardizes its budget and the ability of Black youths from the surrounding communities to enjoy a quality public school education within walking distance of their homes.
While students at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, the first Black high school in the United States, enjoy a curriculum redesign that brings Afrofuturism into the classroom, safety concerns loom large in the aftermath of a May 3 shooting outside of school grounds that shattered a window and injured a student.
A week after that shooting, Dunbar students and youth from other schools commemorated the Bolling v. Sharpe decision during an event that allowed for discussion about a local education ecosystem that now includes public, public charter schools, and African-centered private schools.
On May 10, dozens of students who attended the event, titled “An Examination of Black Education and Chess Tournament,” learned about prominent Black figures, watched African cultural dance and drum performances and discussed the impact of school integration before putting their wits to the test in a couple rounds of chess.
Program coordinator and D.C. Public Schools alumna Ateya Ball-Lacy said she and Vaughn Bennett, founder of the D.C. State Chess Federation, hosted the event with the intent to instill academic excellence in Black children and further scrutinizing what they are, and aren’t, getting from their public school education.
Although she acknowledged the gains that many public school students are making in the D.C metropolitan area, Ball-Lacy still touted the need for a culturally-foundational education.
She heralded Nationhouse, an African-centered school that her daughter attended, as an ideal institution for Black children navigating what she called a society lacking in principles.
“In our public school systems, there’s not a lot of effort to cultivate strong African children who are becoming strong African young adults,” Ball-Lacy, founder of HoodSmart, an organization focused on African-American youth who excel in the STEM field, told The Informer.
“When that process is missing, our children are coming out brilliant without a focus on nation building,” she added. “We have to be reflective on what’s working and what’s not working, how children are being socialized, what they are learning about their ancestors and what type of energy we are cultivating when it’s missing.”
Ball-Lacy said she received that type of education as a student at Shaw Junior High School between 1986 and 1989.
In 1928, Shaw Junior High School, an all-Black school, came into existence when the William McKinley Manual Training School, an all-white school, moved out of its building on 7th Street and Rhode Island Avenue in Northwest.
After school segregation ended, Shaw remained majority African American, and it began to deteriorate to the point that it became known as “Shameful Shaw.” During the latter part of the 1960s, the Rev. Walter Fauntroy founded the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO) as a means to organize residents and small business owners around the Shaw community’s economic development.
Ultimately, the Shaw Urban Renewal Area Plan would come to fruition in 1969, a year after the assassination of King, who led a parade through the Shaw community in 1967 in support of MICCO’s efforts.
By the time Ball-Lacy enrolled in Shaw, the school moved to a new building on 9th Street and Rhode Island Avenue in Northwest. Though not what many today would define as an African-centered educational institution, Ball-Lacy said that Dr. Percy Langston Ellis, Jr., Shaw Junior High’s principal at the time, personified the same values as Nana Agyei Kwame Akoto, one of Nationhouse’s founders.
Those values, she said, fostered an atmosphere where she and her sister cultivated their genius under the watchful eye of multi-talented teachers, like band director Lloyd Hoover, and their principal who protected them from the elements of urban life.
“Dr. Ellis held everyone to a high standard,” Ball-Lacy said. “We were in the thick of the crack epidemic but we didn’t have that energy in the building. We were allowed to be children. Dr. Ellis was innovative in ways people weren’t ready for. If school funding was cut, it didn’t touch us. He stood 10 toes down in his stance against foolishment.”
A District Elder Who Experienced School Segregation Firsthand
Ann Ricks Underwood, an 89-year old D.C. resident, spends much of her time with her daughter, other family members, and neighbors on her porch in Northwest where on any given day, conversations run the gamut.
Oftentimes, Ricks Underwood and her family talk about the violent crime engulfing the District. As she reflected on her upbringing in the nation’s capital during legal segregation, Ricks Underwood didn’t mince words about the current state of affairs.
“Our parents fought too hard for us to have an education, good books and to be able to go places for young people to act stupid and ignorant the way they are now,” Ricks Underwood told The Informer.
The middle child of three siblings, Ricks Underwood spent the first 12 years of her life in Georgetown, what was then a majority-Black enclave near Rock Creek Park and the C&O Canal in Northwest.
During her youth, Ricks Underwood went to Phillips and Wormley schools, an all-Black elementary school. By the time that she and her family moved to 18th Street in Northwest, above what’s now known as DuPont Circle, Underwood attended Francis Junior High School, another all-Black school located right above Rock Creek Park.
In the fall of 1949, Ricks Underwood started attending Cardozo High School, then an all-Black school located on 9th Street and Vermont Avenue in Northwest. She counted among the “several hundred” young Black people who attended school in shifts due to overcrowding and a shortage of typewriters and other supplies.
At the start of her senior year in 1951, Ricks Underwood and her peers walked into the new Cardozo High School, which D.C. Public Schools moved to its current location on 13th Street and Clifton Street.
Ricks Underwood said that the building originally housed Central High School, an all-white school that never filled to capacity. As a major in the school cadet program, Ricks Underwood had an opportunity to visit her new school before her peers so she could guide them through the hallways on the first day of school.
Upon entering the building, Ricks Underwood saw messages that the white students left for her and her peers.
“The whites left things like ‘nig**r’ on the wall and all the racist terms,” Ricks Underwood said. “We didn’t pay that no never mind.”
Ricks Underwood told The Informer that her last year as a high school student showed her the potential of what Black children could achieve when given the appropriate resources.
“We all went to school at the same time,” Ricks Underwood said. “We had two gyms and a huge auditorium and they had different rooms for typewriters. We had everything we needed: our own locker and a cafeteria, which we didn’t have [at the old school.]”
By 1952, Ricks Underwood graduated from Cardozo High School. She moved to Barry Farm in Southeast and went on to enjoy life as a wife, mother, and later a D.C. government and federal government employee.
At the time of the Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education decisions, Ricks Underwood’s first child, Valeria, was only one year old. As she looked back on those times, Ricks Underwood realized that she had been in her all Black, family-oriented world, shielded from any worries about segregation.
“I was happy to hear that schools were integrated,” Ricks Underwood said as she reflected on her coming of age. “I didn’t feel too much difference. We never went to the White House. It never bothered us. The only time I remember seeing a difference was going to Luray Caverns [in Virginia] and seeing they had “colored only” bathrooms.”