Education: As the Twig Is Bent

It was in the air (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Even school kids were doing it. Like many of their elders, several thousand U.S. teenagers were on strike.

¶ At Froebel High School, Gary, Ind., which Negroes have attended for 30 years, 500 white boys & girls struck for a Jim Crow school. After ten days, their numbers had swelled to over 800. The Gary school board ordered “legal action” against parents of all strikers, dismissal of any striker 16 or over. Said the Gary Parent-Teachers Association: “We feel ashamed. . . . [The strike is] the work of some unknown organizers of racial hatred.”

¶ At nearby Chicago’s Englewood High School, where attendance is some 60% Negro, the race strike was taken up by 800 more. At Chicago’s Morgan Park High, a Methodist preacher broke in on a strike rally at a vacant lot, told the students they would be striking against the U.S. Constitution. He talked most of them out of it. Chicago’s Mayor Ed Kelly termed the strikes “prank” stuff. A handful of Chicago civic groups hurriedly put on a city-wide “Youth Rally,” starring black & white entertainers (Danny Kaye, “Bojangles” Robinson), to get kids back to class.

¶ In New York City, several thousand school kids were out, and tangling frequently with cops, in a strike that had completely lost its point days before. They had originally cut classes in sympathy with the city’s teacher-coaches, who had struck to get extra pay for their sport chores. Long after the coaches had gone back to work, their pupils had not. The kids simply changed their slogan from “No sports—no school” to a call-to-arms with more appeal: “Shorter hours, more sports, less homework!”

A flying squadron of them turned up at Brooklyn’s High School for Homemaking, there found some of the girls mad because the school’s evening socials had been dropped. Out on strike went a gang of girls, with the war cry: “It’s an old maid’s institution.”