Robert Shaw Elementary
The closing of the last traditionally Black school in DeKalb County, Georgia (1969)
When the DeKalb County Board of Education submitted its desegregation plan to federal officials in April 1969, they called for closing five of the district’s remaining six Black schools. As was often the case, no white schools were on DeKalb’s closure list.
Robert Shaw Elementary was the only Black school DeKalb County planned to keep open. But, as School Superintendent Jim Cherry pointed out, there would be “considerable negotiations” about its future. The April plan created new school attendance zones. The Black students who had attended the five Black schools slated to close would be reallocated to white schools. The attendance zone for Robert Shaw, however, would require some white families to send their kids to this traditionally Black elementary school. That’s where the “considerable negotiations” that Cherry warned about would come into play.
In a court hearing on April 29, 1969, Paul Rilling, regional director of the federal government’s Health, Education, and Welfare department’s Office of Civil Rights, “raised the question of whether the DeKalb system could minimize the racial identification at Shaw by redrawing the attendance zone lines.” The Board of Education’s plan to integrate the Shaw school depended on guesswork about residential patterns in the school’s neighborhood.
According to C. Murphy Candler, the school board’s attorney, DeKalb County was banking on two new apartment complexes being built just around the corner from the school. The board hoped these apartments would attract white residents who would then send their kids to Shaw Elementary. But, in a court hearing on this integration plan, Judge Peter Ridskoph had questions about whether or not DeKalb’s predictions about this projected white enrollment would come true. “I gather that you discount the optimism of the defendants [the DeKalb School System] that the Shaw school imbalance will right itself this fall,” he said, adding, “I’m skeptical.”
By June 1969, the skepticism surrounding DeKalb County’s ability to integrate Robert Shaw Elementary had grown. During another hearing in front of Judge Newell Edenfield of the U.S. District Court, “witnesses for the school board admitted… that their hopes for a racially balanced school population in the Shaw area were greatly optimistic, if not illusory.” Accordingly, Judge Edenfield said that the only way the DeKalb County Board of Education could come into compliance with the court’s integration order was to either: (1) close the Shaw school and reallocate its student population to other schools, or (2) redraw the Shaw attendance zone to guarantee more white enrollment.
The Board of Education decided to close the Shaw school. Thus, in an attempt to create a unitary school system for both Black and white students, the board ended up closing all the county’s traditionally Black schools. “In making this choice, the board contends, and the court agrees,” Judge Edenfield ruled, “that a redrawing of school lines in this area or a paring of Shaw school with some other school, while bringing about desegregation on a temporary basis, would almost certainly lead to resegregation within one to two years by reason of the white population moving out of the area.” As such, the court concluded that “the only solution offering any promise of any permanence is to close the Shaw school as the board suggests and distribute its pupils among neighboring schools.”
So, like I pointed out in my last post, DeKalb County integrated its dual school system into one unitary system by closing all its traditionally Black schools while leaving the traditionally white ones open. Commenting on DeKalb County’s initial desegregation plan, State Representative James Dean of Atlanta made clear that the Black community felt “that integration should be a two-way street.” But, as we see with Robert Shaw Elementary, those holding the political power to make integration decisions often felt otherwise. And we are still living with the consequences of their misguided anxiety and fear.
More to come soon…
Primary Sources
Hurst, Margaret. “Desegregate, DeKalb Told.” The Atlanta Constitution. Jun 13, 1969.
Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb to Get School Order.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 30, 1969.
Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Schools File Plan.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 11, 1969.
Simowitz, Lee. “Negroes March in DeKalb Protest.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 26, 1969.