The Battle for Educational Freedom: The 1949 Indiana “Fair Schools” Bill

FALL 2014 3 The Battle for Educational Freedom The 1949 Indiana “Fair Schools” Bill Monroe H. Little Jr. T oday, scholars widely acknowledge that the 1940s represents a neglected decade of the U.S. civil rights movement. Yet this historical period, part of what Jacquelyn Hall calls the long civil rights movement, remains rich with stories of activists who contested the nation’s definition of freedom and struggled to expand its meaning and enjoyment by groups historically excluded from its full benefits. One such significant event, though frequently overlooked or only mentioned in passing by most historians, was the passage of Indiana’s 1949 “Fair Schools Bill.” The story of its eventual passage is important for twentieth century civil rights history. It extends the struggle for equality backward in time to the New Deal liberalism of the 1930s that accelerated during World War II’s increased impatience among African Americans nationally with the pace of racial reform and the emergence of the classical civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Central to this story are the efforts of Indianapolis African American civil rights activists such as Henry and Rosalyn Richardson, Willard Ransom, Jessie Jacobs, and Starling James as well as a federation of African American social clubs and the local African American press. Along with the NAACP, these activists and groups contested the existing definition of equal educational opportunity in Indiana and initiated a lengthy battle between 1934 and 1949 to pass the fair schools bill. Moreover, it serves as a case study of Doug McAdam’s political process model, which posits that successful social movements require a level of organization and assessment of their possible success within the oppressed group, as well as improved opportunities for reform within the larger political environment . An examination of the historical landscape of this case finds that the confluence of critical factors as identified by McAdam was present in Indiana and the Indianapolis African American community by the late 1940s that enabled it to push successfully for statewide legislation against racial segregation in public schooling by 1949. Consequently, the Indiana “Fair Schools” battle enhances our understanding of the late 1940s post-World War II struggle in Northern and Midwestern states to bring increased public attention to racial discrimination and build broad-based interracial community support for social reform.1 THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Despite its identification as a northern free state, white supremacy and its offshoot, anti-black discrimination, has a long and ignoble history in Indiana. Before the Civil War, wrote historian Emma Lou Thornbrough, “the Black Code of Indiana had scarcely been equaled in its harshness by any other northern state.”2 African Americans suffered discrimination in housing, employment and schooling. State law prohibited interracial marriage and Indiana’s revised 1851 Constitution even barred African Americans from settling in the state— unless they posted a bond. Although some of Indiana’s worst anti-black laws were repealed after the Civil War, the state’s African American citizens continued to encounter racial segregation in public transportation and were denied access to public facilities such as hotels, theatres and restaurants. Some rural Indiana communities , known as “sundown towns,” prohibited African Americans from settling in them or even staying overnight.3 A similar situation existed in public education. Indiana’s 1877 School Law permitted, but did not mandate, racial segregation in the assignment of students, leaving the decision in the hands of local citizens and school officials. As a result, racial segregation in Indiana’s public schools was virtually non-existent in some counties and communities in central and northern Indiana, such as Indianapolis. In southern Indiana counties and many other cities in the state, however, separate schools were maintained.4 By the 1920s the situation with respect to race and public schooling took a turn for the worse. In both Indianapolis and Gary, Indiana—cities with the state’s largest African American populations—racial segregation in public education became official school board policy during that decade. Growth in the state’s African American population, as a result of the Great Migration, and the rise of the Indiana Klan after World War I, precipitated rising demands by white...