Desegregation of Cleveland Public Schools

Side A: The building at 1380 E. 6th Street, designed by Walker and Weeks, served as the Cleveland Board of Education 1931-2013. During the 1950s and 1960s, the segregation of Cleveland Public Schools was the center of the city’s civil rights movement. Parents, like Daisy Craggett and Eddie Gill, protested relay classes and intact busing. The United Freedom Movement, a coalition of 50 civic, religious, and parent organizations, initiated demonstrations, sit-ins, and pickets, to galvanize the fight for education equality. On April 7, 1964, Reverend Bruce Klunder, vice president of Cleveland’s Congress of Racial Equality, was accidentally killed by a bulldozer at the future Stephen E. Howe Elementary School while he lay in a construction ditch to protest school re-segregation. His death ignited an April 20 boycott in which 85-95% of Cleveland’s Black students participated. (Continued on other side) Side B: (Continued from the other side) In 1964, the school board hired Paul Briggs as superintendent of the public school system. Briggs shifted the focus from integration to “quality education” across the school district. Arnold Pinkney, a well-respected and key leader in the Black community, served on the school board at the time. Pinkney initiated neighborhood community councils in support of quality education. In 1973, the Cleveland NAACP sued Cleveland and Ohio school boards for de jure segregation in Reed v. Rhodes. Judge Frank Battisti ruled on August 31, 1976, that the Cleveland School Board had practiced intentional segregation for over 35 years. The court ordered desegregation. Cleveland implemented cross-city busing of Black and White students by 1980. In 1998, Judge George White ruled that Cleveland had met the remedial court order to desegregate its public schools.