Chapter 11
THE POLITICAL FOOTBALL THAT KICKED BACK:
The School as a Social Force
On the one side of the street was Simon Gratz High School, one of the most overcrowded and most neglected schools in Philadelphia. No one denied Gratz's need for expansion.
Across the way were fourteen homes and a couple of stores. It was a logical place for the school's addition, but the people over there wanted to keep their homes and businesses.
At first glance, it was a simple conflict the property rights of a few people versus the education needs of many. But it was more complex than that because the homeowners were white and represented the middle-class power structure in town. The school was almost all black and symbolized the position of the poor and powerless.
It was a situation made for choosing up sides.
Gratz needed space. Besides operating on two shifts, the school had to schedule minor subjects and other educational programs after school or on Saturdays or not at all. Additional classrooms were needed immediately.
The problem with the gymnasium, while not so important academically, was even more irritating to the student body. The gyms were the worst in the city. They were so small that when the students did tumbling on the mats, they had to begin in the smaller gym, hurtle through the doorway, and then hit the mats. The ceilings were so low, a highly arched basketball would hit the rafters. The floors were warped; the showers, a disgrace.
To high school students, the physical education program means a lot. But what really hurt was that our athletes often traveled to schools in the richer areas and saw the excellent facilities. The only other schools in the city that were in real need of new gyms were two, which, like Gratz, served mainly poor, non-white populations. It seemed that someone was try-ing to tell our children something.
In 1965, the Board of Education began a search for a site that would provide relief from the overcrowding. A new gymnasium, so vital for school spirit and student health, was to be included.
The School District and the Philadelphia City Planning Commission finally agreed that the best location would be the plot of land directly across from the school. This site would permit the building of both the gymnasium and sixteen additional class-rooms. If the street were closed, the space between the new building and the old would provide a campus where students could relax after their lunch period and before and after school.
Negotiations dragged on for the next two years. Students waited while bureaucrats talked. Finally, the Board of Education stated its determination to take the fourteen houses by amiable agreement if possible, or by whatever measures might become necessary. In a case like this, the Board had the power of eminent domain.
Around this time, I became principal of Gratz. It was vital to get going on the addition. The local Boys' Club agreed to support us by giving us some land for an outdoor stadium. The Redevelopment Authority also agreed to throw in a parcel. This meant that we had enough land to do the thing right. Our Home and School Association publicly called for action.
Then, just prior to the mayoralty election, pressure was exerted to have the community ease off. There was the understanding that after the election, the houses, the other two parcels of land, and the street closing would all be granted the school. If the community kept up its campaign, however, everything might be lost. I was personally advised that this was the best proposition we would get. We should accept it. No wonder the politicians were so concerned. The Gratz issue was a hot potato. An all-black high school was trying to put fourteen white homeowners off their land. It was almost unthinkable. True, the city and the two local universities had been relocating thousands of black people for twenty years. But now the tables were being turned. It was one thing to have white universities moving poor black people. It was something else to have poor black people moving middle-class white people. The politicians certainly perceived the difference and they suspected their constituents might not like it. Fearing they would lose votes if they went along with the Gratz expansion plans, they asked us to wait.
Well, no matter, I thought. That's the way it is with politics. You have to give a little to get a little.
And no sooner was the election over than the paper carried a notice of the plans for the expansion at Gratz. The president of our Home and School Association was with me when the newspaper came in. "See this?" I asked. "We played the game and we won."
She said, "Mr. Foster, I won't believe that until I see the houses torn down, the building erected, and the key for the door in our hands."
I was more believing than she was. In fact, I was jubilant that everything had come out okay. "See what happens," I said. "You don't always lose if you go along with the establishment. It isn't a black and white issue. They'll support blacks as well as whites if you give them half a chance."
One week later, the community people were proved right. They had known that the system wasn't about to overthrow its tradition of acting one way for the favored group and another way for the have-nots. The system hadn't forgotten how to break promises to poor people. It was just one week later that the Home and School Association president came rushing into my office with a newspaper in her hand. "I hate to say I told you so," she said, telling me and how!
The mayor had issued a statement declaring that the Board of Education would receive no more funds from the city if the houses were taken. This was a pretty strong threat since our school system was nearly bankrupt and certain to need city help to avoid closing months before the official end of the school year.
On top of this, a spokesman for the City Council said that even if the houses were taken through the Board's use of eminent domain, the Council would not pass the ordinance to close the street.
This was a total repudiation of understandings which had been accepted by the Gratz community in good faith. The action demonstrated total disregard for the education of four thousand students and a complete capitulation to the politics of placating one's friends.
In the face of this pressure from city hail, the School Board began to back down. It made an agreement with the mayor and City Council that plans for our expansion would be turned back to a special task force comprised of city hall and Board of Educa-tion planners.
Nothing could have made the facts of life more crystal clear to me. It was a struggle between those who have power (and their friends) and those who are thought to be voiceless and powerless. The sys-tem had to be forced to deliver. The School Board itself was in a precarious position; it had to be careful not to bite the hand that was feeding it.
We knew now, of course, that if we were willing to sit back, those in power were plenty willing to let us. As they saw it, we did not figure at all in the final decision. We were not even players in the game.
Because I had been responsible for permitting the time schedule to be changed, I felt a personal responsibility for helping to set things right. There would be no more compromising the right of our students for a decent education, just to keep peace between the School Board and the city fathers. And if I needed anything else to convince me, it came when a politician brought me a new suggestion.
"Marc," he said, "here's what you do. Put your gym on another parcel. In ten or fifteen years when the old people who own the homes die or move, we'll give you the homes and you can have your playing
Ten years! Fifteen years! Those most in need of a comprehensive, enriched program would still be getting the crumbs. Thousands of children would suffer for each home left standing across the street. Who ever heard of asking so many youngsters to give up so much for so few?
We were not going to wait. The issue was first-class facilities and first-class education now. The politicians would get no more help from us in running their game on our students. We would face them head on and see if we could win for the students what they were entitled to.
The plan was to mobilize the community and dramatize our cause for the entire city. A showdown would come within two weeks at the next School Board meeting.
I explained to the faculty that they were under no obligation to get into it. I just wanted to let them know what my stand was. But they responded enthusiastically. Several wrote strong letters to the mayor, the City Council, and the newspapers. Our National Teacher Corps members outlined a strategy for bringing in pressure from the national office. With the Home and School Association taking the leadership role, we began to organize all kinds of groups in the area. We worked with militants as well as with system-oriented people.
On one bitterly cold morning, ten white pickets from a human rights organization marched in front of the all-white church whose members supported the homeowners. The pickets' group was dedicated to combating racism in the white community via education and demonstration. They carried signs that read "Human Rights Before Property Rights" and "No White Privilege in Philadelphia."
All kinds of groups were working for us, but significantly it was the Gratz community that was leading the way. We set up strategy sessions on Tuesday nights and without sending out formal announcements, the word got around. The meetings were mobbed.
We picked our targets carefully, the politicians one time, the Board of Education the next; churches this week, busy streets the next. Every session included a letter-writing period. Within a few days, the drama of Gratz's struggle had caught the imagination of people throughout Philadelphia. Many citizens saw justice in what we were saying. Press, radio, and television commentators began to editorialize in our favor.
All this movement was not overlooked by the politicians. They now mounted an offensive of their own. The president of City Council suddenly called for an "all-new" Gratz High School. He said he did not "see any wisdom at all in adding to an already obsolete school such as Gratz." Besides, he continued: "It's not a question of education now. It's a question of destroying good homes in good neighborhoods. These are not slum homes we are speaking about." A lot of folks, reading that, got the message.
Of course, the newspapers blasted this suggestion. It was painfully clear that there was no money for a new school, and no land, as well.
We redoubled our efforts. The week before the crucial Board of Education vote on taking the homes, we urged all interested citizens to write to the president of the Board of Education. "Make it known to him," we wrote, "that the community supports the just demands of Gratz High School for expanded facilities.
"The Board of Education must know that the entire community will not tolerate making a political football out of the education of boys and girls. "The mayor must receive letters and telegrams from citizens and organizations in order to convince him that education.. . transcends any political ob-ligation to protect the comfort of a select group of citizens. It must be pointed out that the unusual zeal in this special case creates a climate that po-larizes the city. There are numerous examples of homes that have been taken where no massive political pressure has interceded on behalf of the residents.
"If all loyal Gratzonians, parents, friends and citizens who care about education move quickly, this matter can be resolved in the favor of education. Generations of students will be benefited because concerned citizens have taken action today."
No sooner had this phase of our campaign begun than the City Council president accused the Board of Education of resorting to pressure tactics. He warned that he was at the end of his patience. He went on to charge that the School District hired agitators to fan unrest at Simon Gratz. When pressed for proof of outside influences, he had nothing to say, but he made one thing clear: he did not like pressure coming from certain quarters. We knew what that meant. He had received our letters and telegrams. At least we were getting some kind of feedback. We were not voiceless anymore.
A few days before the Board meeting, the Philadelphia Housing Association, a nonprofit United Fund organization, suggested a plan for relocating the families in a new housing development actually closer to their church than they now were. This idea gave us more hope. Not taking any chances, however, our Home and School Association continued to circulate petitions to present to the Board. At the same time, plans were made to bring hundreds of community persons to the meeting. "They will not demonstrate or picket," said the president, "and very few of them will speak, but the Board will see them and will know they are there."
Judgment day came. Monday morning, a few hours before the open-meeting time, the Board held its regular private meeting to review the business on the agenda. When lunchtime came, word leaked that the Board had decided not to act. I thought we were dead.
As the time for the open meeting drew close, hundreds of supporters arrived in buses. After the two hundred seats in the board room were filled, the over-flow began to jam a larger auditorium upstairs to watch the proceedings on closed circuit television. Tension mounted. School Board officials activated a so-called "war room" from which they, too, viewed the meeting on television while analyzing reports from the Civil Disobedience Unit. But our people were pledged to nonviolence. The action was to be centered in debate.
The School Board president began by suggesting that the decision be postponed. He reminded his colleagues that the Board had agreed not to take action until the planning task force made its report.
The Board vice-president interrupted by saying: "We agreed to wait on this thing until after the elec-tions. The elections are over."
Now, speaker after speaker got up. A white English teacher spoke of the deplorable crowded conditions and quoted one of her students as saying: "Why do you ask me not to cut? If I come to school, you know there is not enough room in the classroom for me to sit down."
A city councilman took his turn. Distinguished ministers stood up for us. Representatives from CORE and from the Citizens' Committee on Public Education testified. It continued for three hours.
The pleas were eloquent, but what seemed to turn the tide was the Board's realization that the community was determined to support the Board whatever the repercussions if a decision were made to proceed immediately in defiance of the over-whelming political pressure that had been brought to bear. When the vote was taken, the majority of the Board's members favored moving "with dispatch to acquire the fourteen homes."
The headlines on the following day were something: "School Board Defies Mayor"; "Negro Leaders Hail Gratz High Victory." At Gratz, teachers, parents, and students were in ecstasy. For the first time, they had had an impact on the society that shapes their lives.
But it wasn't until much later, after the City Council agreed to close the street, that we understood the full impact of our fight at Gratz. The newspapers carried headlines such as "Riots Go Out of Style" and "Negro Action Turns to Political Pressure." What was happening was that poor people, throughout the city, were taking the Gratz fight as a symbol of what could be done. As one newspaper analyst saw it: "For once, Negroes with whites in supporting, rather than leading roles went after and got action by applying political pressure to a red-hot controversy. Despite an informal agreement with city bosses and school officials, the Negroes got what they came after when they converged on the School Administration Building."
Of course, as we look back on it, the rhetoric sounds dated. But the notion of strength through unity, of organizing to take responsible stands when issues come up, of the use of sophisticated political action, all this is still very modern.
The Gratz incident woke up a lot of people. The lesson was: if it could be done at Gratz, it can be done whenever we have just causes.
Certainly, the millennium would not be achieved by this single victory. But as I looked around and
listened to the political activists and moderates, listened to the parents and the students, I knew that it had been a historic moment. The Gratz community flexed its muscles and found itself strong.
