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5

Carl Junior

Not all my battles were being fought in the legislature. I fought one at home that benefitted not only my own son but many young black boys who followed him.

My son, Carl Junior, became five years old in 1963. Shirley went to the nearest public school to register him and discovered that the kindergarten class he would be attending already had thirty-seven children enrolled. This was early summer and parents were still registering their children. When I returned home from the legislature, she told me about it and asked me what I though we ought to do. Now, I had watched the deterioration of education in the public schools, and I was determined that my boy would get the maximum of the best education available. I had a friend in Columbus who had sent his children to University School there, a school connected with Ohio State University, and I assumed there would be such an institution in Cleveland. I told Shirley to look for a University School and left the matter with her. The next week she said she had found a private school called University School, but when she called she was told that no Negro children had ever attended there.

I was not pleased. In the previous ten years I had worked on any number of civic campaigns and had worked with some of

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the city's "outstanding citizens," the civic-minded heads of the most prestigious law firms, businesses, industries, and utilities, men who publicly campaign against, among other things, racism. Here was a private school, obviously in the control of some of these same men, that appeared to be maintaining privately the very policies that they were decrying in public.

Shirley and I went to the school and talked to the head of the elementary grades, Jonathan Ingersoll. He told us that he had been trying to get the board of trustees to change its policy. No Negro child would be accepted. Others had applied and been turned down, he said-usually sons of physicians who lived in the suburbs. They had never fought the policy because they didn't want the publicly known that their children had been denied admission to this prestigious school. Now, I was a politician, a man who lives in the public, and I didn't give a damn about the prestige thing, I wasn't about to handle the matter quite so delicately. I told Mr. Ingersoll that I was going to make an application for Carl Junior and that he could expect that the school's experiences with me would me somewhat different from its past experience with black parents. (I later learned that Ingersoll had been forthright with us. He had in fact fought the issue, but had never won his case.)

It happened that another black family was trying to enroll their son in the school at the same time. Dr. Sylvester Davis and I had grown up together; his family lived on East Seventieth Street when I lived on East Sixty-ninth. He was trying to enroll his son, who was the same age as mine. Ingersoll told me that Dr. Davis had applied and that he had had to tell him the same thing. I thanked him for his comments and asked for a list of the members of the board of trustees of the school.

Shortly after we made the application, we received a reply from Roland McKinney, Jr., headmaster of University Schools, explaining to us that our son, Sylvester Davis, Jr., would not be accepted. McKinley's secretary had put Davis' letter into my envelope and mine into his. I immediately sat down at my own desk.

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Dear Mr. McKinley:

       Ordinarily I would have had some problem in answering your letter of July 28, 1963, in that the envelope addressed to me and my wife contained a letter addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Sylvester S. Davis. The letter informed them that their child Sylvester Jr., had not been accepted for enrollment. Since, however, I knew that their problem was identical to mine, namely the peaceful, uneventful acceptance of a young child who happens to be a Negro into a school which, from all appearances, has always been restricted to white students only, I was able to reason that that tradition would permit an identical form letter to both Negro families, regardless of the proper identification. No other ordinarily insignificant secretarial error could have so well dramatized an institutional policy.

       Now I accept the fact that at the late date we applied for Carl's admission there were no vacancies. I appreciate in full Mr. Ingersoll's unsolicited effort to take this opportunity for University School to meet the challenge of these times by increasing the quota by two and accepting these two young boys. I do regret the arbitrary decision that this would not be done, which was made unilaterally by the board president and concurred in by you.

       I reject the consideration of space as the basis for this decision, having seen the remodeling currently in progress creating larger classrooms.

       My most basic reaction to this whole matter, however, lies with the information given that should a vacancy occur, neither of these boys would be accepted as a matter of course from the current waiting list. This, I understand, would require "further consideration." I doubt that this position would fare well under the test of public reaction.

       Finally, the perdurance of this policy of segregation and discrimination by University School cannot help but affect my reaction to the public posture of some of your more widely known board members. I have worked closely with many of them in inner-city community affairs. There can be no reconciling of their 60-minute speeches on fair play and equal opportunity at community lunches in Cleveland and

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their endorsement and support of a suburban school's segregation policy where they themselves determine the policy.

Under the signature, I noted that a copy of my letter was being sent to all of he trustees as well as the officers and member of the corporation of the school, some forty-two people.

My phone started jumping off the hook. Here is William Laffer, vice-president of the school and at that time president of the board of trustees of Forest City Hospital, which is operated by black people and serves the black community:

"Carl, this is Bill Laffer."

"Hi, Bill."

"I just got a copy of your letter to University School."

"Yes?"

"You were calling me a racist in there."

"No, Bill. The facts might, but I didn't."

"Well, we're certainly going to do something about this. You'll hear from me."

"Okay, Bill."

A couple of board members called and said they had never noticed there weren't any Negro children at the school.

Ralph Besse, the president of the electric utility in Cleveland, wrote me a long letter explaining to me that I certainly knew better than to think that the school's policy in any way reflected his personal policy, and that he couldn't understand why such treatment was accorded me and that he hoped in the future other black parents would take the opportunity to register their children in University School. I never did understand that little piece of woolgathering, but I knew I had found him at home.

A couple of days later I got a call from the headmaster. Would I come out and talk with him. Certainly. I went out, and he gave me about twenty minutes' worth of talk about being the new headmaster there, about the schools he had worked for in the East, and how certain he was that I was quite wrong in assuming

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that the school was excluding Negroes, that the school had no policy at all on such matters. I told him finally that, since he was new, he had no way of knowing what had been the school's policy. He replied that they couldn't have such a policy, because it was like the schools in the East where he had worked, and they didn't have such policies, and besides, he had gone to an Ivy League university where blacks had been admitted for years, and it was his personal policy that blacks should not be excluded.

I was beginning to understand what he was doing. He wasn't about to let my boy go to his school; he wanted to convince me to be quiet.

"Have you spent the last half hour talking to me in the hope that I am going to withdraw the assertions I made in this letter?"

"I don't know if you should withdraw the letter," he said, "but certainly you say some things there about this school that are simply not true, which I don't think should be permitted to stand unchallenged. You should understand that there is another side."

"The only side I care about, Mr. McKinley, is that my boy is being refused admission to this school because he is a Negro. I guess that is as far as you and I can go, because there isn't one thing in that letter I am about to change, and I am telling you I mean it. I am not one of those Negroes who cares about having people know that my son was refused admission to this prestigious school. Your prestige means nothing to me. And I am not going to keep silent about those men on your board who say one thing at civic functions in Cleveland and then take another attitude once they cross those suburban lines. They may be able to get away with it, but not without everyone I am able to reach knowing about it."

Oddly enough, Mr. McKinley called me back the next day. He was interested in reconsidering Carl Junior's application. Could I bring the boy out. No, he was in Mississippi, and wouldn't be back until the Sunday before Labor Day. Could I bring him out then. On Sunday? Certainly he wouldn't be making decisions about such things at that late date. Well, he didn't know, but he would just like to review the application again and talk with young Carl again.

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Shirley and Carl Junion returned early, but I waited until Sunday morning to call the school. Sure enough, Mr. McKinley was in his office, as I am certain he is every Sunday morning. We took Carl out, and Mr. McKinley sat there and said, "You know, we have reviewed the application , and, since we have had some changes in the kindergarten class, we would like to have Carl join us as part of the school, which of course was our position all along. We would like to know if he can attend class starting Tuesday morning."

At such times it is hard not to strike out, but you hold yourself in and you don't do it. You act as graciously as possible, you say, "Yes, Mr. McKinley, we'll be glad to have him here," and you shake hands and smile, gentlemen all, for this is the way gentlemen act, and we are, first and last, all gentlemen.

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