East Central Illinois Legacy Project: Urbana was first school district in the State to desegregate

If you don’t know the story, you probably know of the image of six-year-old Ruby Bridges walking down the stairs outside of William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on Nov. 14, 1960. 

The small Black girl in a dress and cardigan was surrounded by three U.S. Marshalls when she left her first day in an all-white school. Ruby walked with those U.S. Marshalls to and from school every day as her family feared for her safety.

Bridges was born in the same year (1954) as the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional. Still, in many states, there still remained the establishment of white schools, Black schools, and Native American boarding schools. 

By 1959, a federal court ordered Louisiana to desegregate, leading the way for Bridges to attend school with her peers of a different race.

These practices of segregation did not only happen in the south, though. Rural communities throughout the Midwest remained mostly white while larger populations, including in Champaign-Urbana with the vast majority of the Black community living on the north side of town and the vast majority of the white population to the south, were segregated. 

The first subdivision in Urbana to allow Black homeowners was Ellis Drive. Evelyn Underwood, Carlos and Willeta Donaldson, Paul and Shirley Hursey, and Jo Ann Jackson were the first four African American residents, living within four houses of each other. By 1965 they had banned together with the vision of desegregating the Urbana School District.

As mail carriers for the University of Illinois, Carlos and Paul came across a dissertation citing the achievement gap between students at the predominately Black school, J.W. Hays Elementary (now Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary) and other schools within the district. The research showed that students at Hays were one or two grade levels below other students when they entered junior high.

Their efforts began at the grassroots level, meetings in Hursey’s home and at church, school board meetings and getting involved in the PTA. With federal law on their side, the group asked the Urbana School Board for an audience. 

Because of their efforts, in 1966, the Urbana School District became the first statewide to institute a desegregation program. 

The group, known as the Ellis Drive Six, didn’t just leave the decision at the vote, though. They went into the schools to check on the students.

With Black students in different schools throughout the district, and white students at Hays, some community members balked at the decision while a year later, three residents decided to run for the school board to overturn the decision. Other members of the community, both Black and white came together to re-elect the members of the board who voted to desegregate. 

Then by 1968, when the school district was well-integrated, Evelyn Underwood became the first Black person to serve on the Urbana School Board. 

An April 2019 report by The Century Foundation found that integration closed the K-12 racial achievement gap “more rapidly during the peak years of school desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s than they have overall during the more recent era in which desegregation policies were dismantled.”

The report showcases that students who attend integrated schools have higher average test scores, are more likely to enroll in college, are less likely to drop out, see a reduction in racial achievement gaps, engage in critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. Graduates of these schools are more likely to seek out integrated settings in life and are less likely to have racial bias or stereotypes.

Sources for the story: The Museum of the Grand Prairie, The Urbana Free Library, newspapers.com and The News-Gazette

Additional Readings:
How Desegregation Changed Us: The Effects of Racially Mixed Schools on Students and Society

Long-run Impacts of School Desegregation & School Quality on Adult Attainments

U.S. school segregation in the 21st century Causes, consequences, and solutions