In January 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family into an apartment on the corner of 16th and Hamlin in North Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago. King came to Chicago and launched a campaign to end slums alongside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and local Civil Rights organizers and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). This campaign was a multi-faceted attack on the institutions that created conditions of economic exploitation in housing, employment, and education in Black communities.[1]

Three years earlier, veteran Black educator Barbara Sizemore became principal at Anton Dvorak Elementary School. Located at 3615 W 16th Street, Dvorak was right down the street from what would become the King family’s North Lawndale home. When Sizemore became principal in 1963, North Lawndale was a densely populated lower-income African American neighborhood and a major settlement destination for more recent southern Black migrants. Like many all-Black schools in Chicago, Dvorak was overcrowded. By 1965 the school enrolled more than 1,400 students in a school building with only 34 classrooms.[2] 

Sizemore implemented innovative teaching strategies at Dvorak, but she found little support for her efforts from school desegregation advocates. She reorganized the grade structure of the school and emphasized the importance of diagnosing students skill mastery, incorporating phonics into reading instruction, and conducting continuous staff development. Sizemore recalled later that, integrationists saw my new racially isolated school as a disaster about to happen and told me that my children didn't have a snowball's chance in hell for success. However, during her first two years as principal, Dvorak students reading test scores increased dramatically. Sizemore found little support, however, from desegregation advocates in her efforts to promote Dvorak students accomplishments.[3]

During the early to mid-1960s Civil Rights groups in Chicago, like other places in the country, promoted desegregation as the solution to problems of racial inequality in schools. Many schools in Chicago's Black communities were overcrowded, severely under-resourced, and in poor physical condition. Protests against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Superintendent Benjamin Willis anti-integration policies were among the core activities of Civil Rights groups in the city including the October 22, 1963 Freedom Day boycott in which nearly a quarter of a million students stayed home from school demanding greater resources for Black students and the desegregation of CPS. The Freedom Day boycott took place in the fall of Sizemore's first year as principal at Dvorak. As was the case in many all-Black schools, approximately ninety-eight percent of Dvorak students participated in the boycott.[4]

Sizemore, however, had long been wary of integrationists claims that Black children needed to attend school with White children in order to receive a quality education. Sizemore believed that desegregation policites reinforced notions of Black inferiority by identifying all-Black spaces as inherently inferior, without identifying all-White spaces as inferior, negative, or unequal. Sizemore used her students’ success at Dvorak to argue that Black children could excel in all-Black schools. In her memoir, she recounts failed attempts to highlight her successes at Dvorak to movement leaders, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr.  Within the political environment at the time, where Civil Rights politics and notions of justice were closely associated with the fight for school desegregation, Sizemore's promotion of Black achievement at segregated Dvorak was off message and fell on deaf ears. She was pejoratively labeled Aunt JeBarbara and accused of defending the racist policies of Superintendent Willis.[5]

In the mid-1960s, the tension that existed between desegregation efforts and strategies foregrounding self-determinist ideas of community building were not confined to education struggles.  This tension also existed in King's work with the Chicago Freedom Movement between the community building impulses of the campaign to end slums (Black people working to improve the conditions in the segregated communities where they lived) and the desegregation demonstrations for open housing on the Southwest Side that became the lasting image of this period of organizing.  By the end of the 1960s the tide would turn, as many African Americans turned away from desegregation to more assertively advocate for community control. However, the legacy of tensions between integration and Black self-determination that animated this earlier period persist today in our approaches to the racial and economic geographies of opportunity and inequality in the city and the varying strategies used to organize communities, confront institutional racism, and make demands on the state.

[1] Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 189; Martin Luther King Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_chica...

[2] Barbara A. Sizemore, Walking in Circles: The Black Struggle for School Reform (Chicago: Third World Press, 2008), 27-42; Chicago Board of Education, Racial/Ethnic Survey Students 1964 (Chicago, IL, 1964); Chicago Board of Education, Head Count Report, 22 October 1963, and CPS, September 1963 Facilities Inventory, in folder Aug.-Oct. 1963, box 1, Cyrus Adams Hall III Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL; Illinois Department of Public Instruction, Directory of Illinois Schools, 1965-1966, (Springfield, IL, 1966).

[3] Sizemore, Walking in Circles, 42-43.

[4] Dionne Danns, Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in Chicago Public Schools, 1963-1971 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37-41; Anderson and Pickering, Confronting the Color Line, 2, 82-102; Timeline, University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections, accessed September 23, 2014, http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/specialcoll/services/ rjd/CULExhibit/Urban%20 League%20Exhibit/Timeline.htm; School-By-School Story of Boycott, Chicago Daily Defender, 23 October 1963.

[5]Sizemore, Walking in Circles 43-44; Danns, Something Better for Our Children, 20-54; Anderson and Pickering, Confronting the Color Line, 2, 85-102, 105-126.