Ulysses S. Grant Elementary School

Extensive population growth in Royal Oak Township spurred construction of the Ulysses S. Grant Elementary School in 1926. The Ferndale School District created mandatory attendance areas that relocated many of the Black students in the district to Grant School. Prolonged periods of overcrowding became a recurring issue at the school. The Ferndale School District expanded Grant School infrequently and failed to transfer students to schools operating below capacity. From 1939 to 1941, the school operated at nearly 200 percent capacity and held half-day sessions to educate its students. In 1941 parents and teachers led a “stay-away-from-school strike” that lasted three weeks—until the school board reinstated a full-time schedule and began constructing a four-room addition to the school. In 1969 the Ferndale School District became the first school district in the North to be held in official violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) found that the district had intentionally segregated the all-black Ulysses S. Grant Elementary School. HEW revoked the district’s federal aid when it refused to provide a desegregation plan. Litigation lasted for more than a decade. In 1978 the U.S. District Court in Detroit mandated desegregating the school’s faculty but found integration of the student body to be unnecessary. In 1980 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned this decision and ordered the district to eliminate “the vestiges of segregation … root and branch.” Grant Elementary School integrated on January 5, 1981.