Dick Squires grew up on a farm in rural Egg Harbor Township, where black and white children played together, ate lunch in each others’ homes and sat side by side on the bus to school, he said.
But once that bus arrived at the township’s Farmington School, the children parted ways. They attended classes, ate lunch and had recess in separate parts of the school at different times of the day.
“In my memory, it was segregated,” said the 79-year-old Squires, a former Atlantic County executive. “But it didn’t register with me then because we still saw each other before and after school.”
The Farmington School, now part of a county storage yard, is one of the most obvious reminders of South Jersey’s segregated past, but it’s far from the only one. That legacy survives in the memories of generations of former schoolchildren and in a present-day school system still segregated along socioeconomic lines.
According to the New Jersey Education Law Center, low-income students make up 70 percent of students in the former Abbott districts, but only 27 percent of enrollment statewide. The state’s 31 poorest districts — the so-called Abbotts, which receive additional state aid as a result of a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings starting in 1985 — also serve more than half of the state’s black and Hispanic students.
“A small number of school districts serve very high concentrations of poor students and students of color,” law center Director David Sciarra said. “By and large, that describes the New Jersey public school system in 1970, and that’s the system we have today.”
Life in a ‘colored’ school
Ada McClinton’s teachers and administrators accepted nothing but the best from their pupils.
“If you hadn’t learned what you needed to know in sixth grade, you wouldn’t be passed on to seventh,” she said. “You stayed there until you learned it.”
Because most of the staff at the all-black New Jersey Avenue school in Atlantic City were members of the Northside community where McClinton grew up, she said, there was added pressure to perform. They were not afraid to speak plainly with parents, and parents, in turn, were invested in their children’s future.
“The strange thing is, most of the parents of children I knew didn’t have a formal education,” she said. “But they knew education was important for you to achieve and get a better job than they had.”
McClinton, 88, said it’s that tight-knit support that allowed her to succeed when she moved on to the integrated Atlantic City High School in 1937. The only black student for her first two years of college preparatory courses, she graduated with honors in 1941.
She went on to Hampton Institute and worked for the federal government in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., before coming back to work for a consulting firm. Now retired, McClinton still lives in Atlantic City.
Richlyn Goddard, a history professor at Richard Stockton College and herself a student of the segregated Pennsylvania Avenue School during the 1950s, said McClinton’s story is representative of many of the students funneled through Atlantic City’s segregated schools.
The city’s schools, which remained segregated in the primary grades through the 1950s, were known as some of the best in the country, she said.
“Atlantic City was considered a mecca to come establish yourself if you didn’t want to go to a city or stay in the country,” she said.
In the 1920s, Goddard said, there were a few National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lawsuits on behalf of black children who lived closer to the white schools. But, generally, black families were resistant to integration.
“Coming from the South, people were used to separate facilities,” she said. “They didn’t make demands for change in the North.”
Goddard said there were even a few cases in which white families were turned away from black schools, decisions backed by the school boards at the time.
“They felt they were going to continue to run what made parents most comfortable,” she said. “Integrated schools didn’t come until the laws changed.”
The process started in 1948, when the new state constitution banned racial segregation in public schools, but did not accelerate until the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
“I grew up around the time they were changing over,” said Goddard, 64. “We had white and black teachers by the early ’50s, and yet ... it was not comprehensible then for white families to send kids to a black school.”
Preserving the past
Wendel White’s photography exhibit “Schools for the Colored” opened this month at the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts & Humanities in Cape May, where it will remain through April 15. The years-long project was an offshoot of his “Small Towns, Black Lives” portfolio.
“When I was photographing small black American communities, the conversations always came back to the segregated schools in the community,” he said.
From there, the Stockton professor began making trips to colored schools in the North. Many still stand, while others have long been demolished. Using historical photos for reference, White placed the schools — or their silhouettes — in their present-day contexts.
The communities have a complicated relationship with the now-shuttered schools, he said.
“(The school) was the most visible institutional symbol of a kind of separation from the community in which most schools existed,” he said. “But it also held a special place because the black schools often had a dedicated black teacher who was really committed to seeing their students well-educated and prepared.”
While the schools symbolize a painful aspect of America’s past, White said, they also represent the aspirations and hopes of the children who studied there. The project was a way to preserve that complex history, he said.
“Black schools represent ghosts in the landscape,” he said. “These are ghosts we haven’t really dealt with yet.”
Ralph Hunter, founder and curator of the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey in Buena Vista Township, is preserving another piece of the region’s segregated past.
One of the highlights of the museum’s collection is a locker full of the possessions and writings of Hannah P. Lowe, longtime headmaster of the vocational school for minority girls that operated out of the Indiana Avenue School in Atlantic City.
“About eight years ago, I got a phone call from a lady who’d bought a storage locker in Millville,” he said. “Hannah’s daughter Ramona apparently had moved the books and things down there. After Ramona passed, they were sold off at auction.”
Among the signed copies of various works by Langston Hughes — the poet was a regular guest at Atlantic City’s segregated schools — were reams of information about day-to-day life at the school.
“There was a scrapbook put together by herself and her students,” he said. “It’s 500 pages that chronicle the purpose of that school for colored girls — there’s no question those girls went on to do great things.”
Never fully integrated
While racial segregation was banned more than a half-century ago, many local schools are still segregated across socioeconomic lines, and those lines often mirror the old racial ones.
State Department of Education enrollment data show that less than 8 percent of Atlantic City High School students are classified as white, compared with 78 percent at Mainland Regional High School in Linwood and 50 percent at Egg Harbor Township High School.
Sciarra said New Jersey’s segregated schools are a result of demographic changes after World War II that coincided with the state’s move toward integration.
“First was the decline of our cities in terms of property values and income; the growth of affluent suburbs characterized by high wealth, low poverty and low minorities; and state policy that continues to draw district boundary lines (along) municipal boundaries,” he said.
While most states create county- or regionwide school districts, Sciarra said the state has allowed for the creation of many smaller districts that pull students from less diverse neighborhoods.
“Many of the more affluent middle-class and suburban communities have strong educational systems and low poverty rates,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sciarra said, urban districts such as Atlantic City and Pleasantville serve student bodies that tend to come from poorer households and have greater needs, such as limited English proficiency.
DOE data show that 65 percent of Atlantic City High School students’ first language spoken at home is English, while 17 percent are enrolled in limited English proficient programs. Meanwhile, 99 percent of Mainland students grew up in English-speaking households; less than 1 percent were in Mainland’s LEP program.
The urban schools also face higher turnover and dropout rates due to greater economic instability within students’ families.
The class of 746 students that entered ninth grade in Atlantic City in 2006 had dwindled to 477 by senior year in 2009; 20 percent of the entire student body either enrolled or departed during the 2009-10 school year. The same class at Mainland dropped from 429 to 364, and had a turnover rate of less than 8 percent.
Sciarra said consolidating school districts beyond municipal lines could help solve these problems, but that’s never been politically expedient.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of improvement (since the 1985 Abbott decisions), but because the poverty is so deep in many of these communities, the challenge of getting them up to suburban levels is substantial,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”
From her vantage point as a college professor, Goddard said more work needs to be done at the community level to encourage today’s segregated students to look beyond their current situation.
“Because inner-city kids don’t get as much home-based reinforcement, instead of going to college they get out of school and go to work,” she said.
Goddard said today’s youths need strong role models and mentors within the school, the kind who encouraged her and McClinton when they attended segregated schools.
“This is something teachers and guidance counselors need to be more aware of,” she said. “Their job is to reach all students, to encourage them to go to higher education, to get the skills and respect they need to find jobs that are meaningful.”
Contact Wallace McKelvey:
609-272-7256
