When I started high school in the fall of 1958, my sister was beginning her senior year there. Fenger's enrollment back then was somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 students.
The 1959 Yearbook (Courier) showed my sister as graduating and me as a freshman. All students were classified by semester, rather than by year. For example, your first semester as a freshman one would be a 1B student and the following semester one would be 1A. A senior would be 4B in the first semester and 4A in the second. Why? Students started school at two different time periods in Chicago. Most started in September while others started in January. So, when I began in the fall of 1958, I was a 1B. Those who started high school in January of 1958 would be 1A when I started. I believe the purpose of splitting up classes was due to overcrowding of the high schools, but I am unsure of that.
Now to the racial composition. In the 1959 Courier, both senior graduating class combined had 50 black kids. In 1962, when I graduated, both senior graduating classes had only 1 black kid! The old paradigm was once a school or neighborhood started to become integrated, the white families would start to move out until the entire neighborhood would now be segregated - only as black families. So how could Fenger High school go from 50 graduating blacks to only 1 in a three year time span?
Answer: Build a new high school that would siphon off the black kids thus making Fenger a white high school and the new high school a black high school. The new high school was Harlan High. It was built just east of the new Dan Ryan Expressway (which also divided white and black neighborhoods much farther north to almost downtown Chicago). So my commute to high school was around 4 times greater distance than to another public high school. The "unwritten law" is that you don't go into the projects !!!!
Once again, that was the way it was throughout my high school years. And it was totally acceptable to all the whites I knew - including myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment