The school boycott and the settlements that answered it

1949 — 1979

The concentration: Before 1945 the Fort Wayne school board had not operated racially separate schools. After the war its boundary-drawing changed that: by 1949, 75.5 percent of Black elementary pupils were concentrated in three schools, up from 53.4 percent twenty years earlier, and in 1951 the board refused to let two Black basketball players transfer from Central High School to North Side. In 1968 some six hundred people marched on City Hall for six days, demanding Black representation on the school board and the desegregation of Central High.

The boycott: In September 1969 Black parents boycotted the four central-city schools — Hanna, Harmar, McCulloch and Smart. More than 1,300 children stayed out and were taught instead in Freedom Schools held in six Black churches, led by the Rev. Jesse White of True Love Baptist Church and fifteen Black ministers. The boycott ran about nine to ten days and ended when the state superintendent of public instruction negotiated a settlement: the district agreed to adopt an integration policy, and to stop construction and modernization of central-city schools until an integration plan was in place.

The settlement's shape: At the high schools the board's answer was to close Central in 1971. For the elementary and middle schools, the board reached an out-of-court settlement with Black parents in 1977 over the first-phase desegregation plan, and chose magnets over busing: the Summit Program placed special classes in inner-city schools to draw white families in, and early in 1979 the district appointed principals for its first two magnet schools, at Young and at Memorial Park. No federal court ever ordered Fort Wayne's desegregation; the record shows a boycott, a state-brokered agreement, a board-closed high school and a negotiated magnet plan. The schools record owns the full telling; this is the dispute as a civic episode.

Sources:

1. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City: African Americans, Jobs, and Housing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1940–1960," Indiana Magazine of History (1999) — the boundary concentration by 1949 and the 1951 transfer refusal.
2. News-Sentinel retrospectives, "1960–1969" and "1970–1979: Era of Crises" — the boycott, the Freedom Schools, the 1977 settlement, the Summit Program and the 1979 magnet appointments.
3. The schools and Black-history records, Schools & Colleges and Black History — the 1968 march and the desegregation course at full size.