MLK's Advice to a Student Activist
“Often you are accomplishing much more than you can see at the moment because you are in the heart of the situation...”
While the popular media narrative today — and at the time — posed the problem of segregation and racial inequality in the 1960s as a largely Southern problem, northern cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston were among the worst offenders.
For the civil rights movement in Chicago, public schools were front and center. The school board, under Superintendent Benjamin Willis, took the occasion of a massive increase of Black families moving to Chicago to further segregate Chicago’s public education system. As Erin Blakemore describes it:
Many schools were so crowded that students had to attend in shifts; by 1960, up to 33,000 black students only attended school for four hours a day so that their schools could accommodate all their enrolled students. Auditoriums, basements, cafeterias and even hallways became classrooms. Supplies were at a premium.
Schools that served majority-Black student populations were underfunded and overcrowded, with many in unsanitary conditions. Instead of sending Black students to neighboring white-majority schools, to alleviate overcrowding Willis hauled in CONTINUE READING: MLK's Advice to a Student Activist | Schott Foundation for Public Education