A “Voice from the Gallery”: Andrew Ramsey and School Desegregation in Indianapolis

26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY A “Voice from the Gallery” Andrew Ramsey and School Desegregation in Indianapolis Modupe Labode F or more than a quarter of a century, the editorial pages of the most prominent African American newspaper in Indianapolis featured a lively column called “Voice from the Gallery.” From 1946 until his death in 1973, Andrew Ramsey, a “softspoken and urbane” African American teacher, wrote provocative essays for the weekly newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder. Its subjects ranged widely from the commercialization of Christmas to basketball, yet remained united by the consistent themes of African American civil rights and the need to achieve a racially integrated country. In the words of the Recorder, Ramsey’s essays “battled the many-headed monster of white supremacy” and confronted any “person or institution…which sins against the light of human liberty.” Ramsey’s experiences as a teacher at Indianapolis’s segregated Crispus Attucks High School informed his longstanding efforts to desegregate and integrate the city’s schools. The corpus of Ramsey’s writings reflect the work of an informed, politically active teacher and provide a valuable and rare perspective on the process of school desegregation as it evolved in a northern city.1 As school systems throughout the country continue to struggle with desegregation in the twentyfirst century, activists and scholars from a variety of political perspectives have questioned the strategies of pursuing desegregation, revisited the promise of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and speculated about the importance of racial desegregation in public schools. Despite the national scope of school desegregation, much of the research has focused on the American South. Ambivalence about the experience of school desegregation has often eclipsed the reasons why activists sued school districts and urged desegregation. Andrew Ramsey’s urgent writings reveal the mindset of northern activists who viewed school desegregation as essential to the struggle for African American equality.2 Andrew Ramsey (1907-1973). COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER COLLECTION, INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY MODUPE LABODE FALL 2014 27 In his columns, Andrew Ramsey articulated his rationale for pursuing school desegregation, identified who was affected or harmed by racially segregated schools, and suggested actions African Americans and their allies could take to defeat segregation. Scholars Argun Saatcioglu and Jim Carl describe this process of articulation as “framing” and argue that in order for social and political change to be feasible, activists must frame the issue to be confronted in terms of “injustice , identity, and agency.” Much of the historical writing on school desegregation focuses on legislative actions and court rulings, but Ramsey’s writings show how grassroots activists responded to political and social changes as they worked toward their goal. Ramsey’s writings also reveal the changing ways in which activists , allies, and opponents understood school desegregation in the context of the larger civil rights struggle, from challenging racial segregation as a harmful practice in the 1940s to ambivalence about court-mandated busing for desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Historians have recently focused on the motivations and activities of “local people,” grassroots activists, and analyzed how their motivations intersected with national civil rights organization. Ramsey was such a local activist, and his writings reveal an acute awareness of how Indianapolis fit within the national civil rights effort. Further, his writing is grounded in his experience as a teacher. Historical analysis of teacher experiences of school desegregation is a relatively recent development . African American teachers often risked serious retribution, even dismissal , if they advocated racial desegregation or belonged to civil rights organizations , including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These conditions likely contribute to the relative scarcity of preserved historical sources generated by teachers. Recent oral histories of schoolteachers are invaluable, but Ramsey’s writings provide a rarely heard voice of a northern teacher commenting on, and participating in, school desegregation as it occurred.4 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Indianapolis was the state’s largest city and home to its largest African American community. Many African Americans (and native-born European Americans) migrated to Indiana from Ohio, North Carolina, Kentucky, andTennessee. The city’s black population grew steadily, drawing migrants from small towns and rural settlements across Indiana...