What’s the story?
Desegregation of Girard College (1954-1968) traces the history of the long battle to integrate Girard College, the North Philadelphia boarding school for “poor, white male orphans.”On July 23, 1953, City Councilman Raymond Pace Alexander introduced a resolution calling for the admission of African-American students to Girard College, the North Philadelphia boarding school for fatherless boys. Nearly fifteen years later in June 1968, Alexander joined fellow civil rights activist Cecil B. Moore at a victory rally celebrating the end of the school’s segregated admissions policy. Standing together on that day, Alexander and Moore embodied different phases of the long battle to desegregate Girard College that notably reflected the evolution of strategies, objectives, and leadership within the modern civil rights movement. Whereas Alexander began the battle over Girard in the courts, epitomizing the movement’s early faith in democratic institutions and their ability to spur racial change, Moore ultimately brought the battle to the streets, organizing a seven-month-long picket that questioned the efficacy of government action and demanded more immediate and radical outcomes.
As racial inequities persisted into the 1960s, efforts to seek redress within the legislative and judicial arenas increasingly gave way to civil disobedience and protest, a shift as discernible in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago as in Selma and Montgomery. As historian Matthew J. Countryman rightly observes, “the modern civil rights movement was as much a product of the black experience of racial oppression in the urban North as it was of life in the segregated South” and those experiences keenly shaped how the effort to desegregate Girard College unfolded through the 1950s and 1960s (Countryman, p. 4).
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theme: Unfinished Revolutionssubjects: Schools, Segregation, Demonstrations, Civil rights
contributing repository: Temple University
submitted by: Staff member
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