Hugh Price and the Integration of DC’s Public Schools

May 23, 1994. Hugh B. Price, vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, sits anxiously in his office in New York, waiting for a phone call that might change the course of his life. The phone rings and he answers. A smile crosses his face. He has just been selected as the new head of the National Urban League, one of the premiere civil rights organizations in the country.

Born and raised in Washington DC, Price had traveled a long road before arriving at the pinnacle. After graduating from Amherst College and Yale Law School, he worked with the Black Coalition of New Haven, eventually becoming its executive director. From there, his remarkable intelligence and leadership abilities brought him to the editorial board of the New York Times, then the Ford Foundation, then WNET-TV in New York, and finally to the Rockefeller Foundation. But the National Urban League gave him a national platform from which he could deal with the issues that truly mattered to him. In his opening speech he outlined three goals: strengthening the education and development of inner city children; aiding their families in becoming self-reliant; and fighting for racial inclusion in the mainstream of American life. His speech resonated, and Price would continue as president of the National Urban League for eight years.

Hugh Price was born at Freedmen’s Hospital in DC on November 22, 1941, and grew up at the family home at New Hampshire Avenue and Park Road, just north of Howard University. His father Kline was a well-regarded physician, his mother Charlotte a volunteer activist, and together they raised Hugh and his older brother, Kline, Jr. in a solid brick townhouse with a welcoming front porch if not much of a yard. That neighborhood is called Columbia Heights today, though Price doesn’t remember it having a particular name when he grew up. Primarily an African American community, Price found the neighborhood warm and nurturing. It was a 15-minute walk from Griffith Stadium, where his beloved Washington Senators played, and close to Bruce Elementary School, the Black school that he attended.

In 1953, when Price finished elementary school, his parents moved to a new home at 4031 19th Street NE, just on the east side of South Dakota Avenue in Woodridge. It was a step up, a detached home with three bedrooms and a spacious yard. The family loved it, but quickly learned that this new neighborhood was not nearly as welcoming as their old one. It was a White block when they moved in, but did not stay that way.

It was a big movement for my family, in particular for my Dad. The neighborhood flipped ethnically probably in the space of about four years. It was really fast. It was amazing. It almost sounded like there were moving trucks on 19th street every week. It was incredible. Thanks to block busting and the outmigration about that time, 1954, White families began moving heavily to Maryland and over to Kaywood, over to Hyattsville, places like that.

I recently spoke with Hugh Price about his youth here. He said part of the reason his parents moved to the Brookland area was for their children’s educational future.

I think they anticipated the possibility of the schools becoming integrated and they wanted me to go to Taft.

Taft Junior High (today Perry Street Prep) was a White school nestled between 18th Street and South Dakota Avenue, only two blocks from the new Price home. Washington’s segregated school system had grown lopsided during the 1940s as more and more African Americans joined the Great Migration and moved north. DC’s Black population swelled, and the schools available to them quickly became overcrowded. So much so that many of the schools split their days and students attended in shifts to accommodate the numbers. On the other hand, the White schools were losing more and more students as White families fled the city and they had plenty of space, but were not open to Black students. African American parents who could afford it sent their kids to Georgetown Day School, which was the first school in the city to integrate, in 1945. That’s where Hugh Price and his brother Kline attended. It was the first time the two studied alongside White children, but it would not be the last.

The 1954 decision handed down by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional, and Bolling v. Sharpe, its companion suit regarding the District of Columbia, would change everything.

The first question faced by city officials: how do we do it? Fast or slow? Some suggested integrating by grades, starting with first grade. That would take 12 years to fully integrate high schools and was deemed unacceptable. Others demanded full integration immediately, beginning with the upcoming fall school term. Dr. Hobart Corning, School Superintendent, was caught in the middle. There were also political considerations. President Dwight Eisenhower publicly stated he wanted Washington DC to be the model for school integration, an example for the country as to how it should be done. With the pressure on, Corning decided on a phased approach, with the first phase being very limited. It would not include African American students who were already in a DC public school the previous year, but would include those who came in from other jurisdictions, or who came from a private school, like Georgetown Day. That made Hugh Price one of a very small handful of Black students who would start at Taft in September.

There weren’t a lot of us. I heard from a fellow…who was a classmate of mine, that had been tapped and was part of that first contingent that came in with me.

As news was announced of a second, larger wave of Black students coming in late October, demonstrations broke out. White students left their schoolrooms at a number of schools to protest the coming integration. Some White students at Taft awkwardly approached Price and his friend.

He and I were asked to join the demonstrations to protest further integration of the school. (laughter) They’re 13 years old. It was a chance to get a day off from school. And you know, I don’t think they thought very hard about it. It’s almost a forgettable incident. It is kind of funny in its own way.

But calls from school administrators and parents, and threats by police got the kids back in their classrooms pretty quickly, and student life went on. But it was not easy for Hugh Price.

I made some friends with some of the White students who lived up South Dakota Avenue in the Riggs Park area, mostly Jewish friends. But there were stresses. My friend and I were asked to be hall monitors in between class, and kids would come by and punch us in the ribs and that kind of thing. But I did very well at Taft, made the Honor Roll in my first semester and every semester I was there. When the Honor Roll list was posted, that first marking period in the fall of 1954, they would post the names using those old plastic alphabet letters that would stick in a board. Well, they left the last letter of my first name and the last letter of my last name off of that list. Just think about that. That was how I was known at Taft for the two years I was there, by the kids who were giving me a hard time. That’s not something you forget.

As he approached graduation at Taft Junior High, Price and his parents had a serious talk about where he should go to high school.

Like the child of a number of middle class Black parents, my parents talked a lot about having me go away to prep school. And I originally was planning on doing that. I was accepted at Mount Hermon, but I said that I didn’t want to go away. I wanted to stay in Washington and enjoy the social life that was pretty robust among Black teenagers in Washington. And my parents said, well, the quid pro quo is that if you’re going to stay in DC, you’ve got to go to one of the best high schools in the city, and the two best high schools were considered to be Wilson and Coolidge. So we concocted a way to get into Coolidge. You could go to one of the other high schools, not your feeder school , if there was a course you wanted to take that the school didn’t offer [Taft was a feeder school for McKinley High School]. And I decided that I wanted to take German because I was expecting to become an engineer, which was the truth. And I expected to take a lot of science courses. So I applied for admission to Coolidge on that basis and was admitted.

Two years into integration, tensions had eased somewhat, but it was still not a smooth path for Hugh Price.

It was a little bit better, and there were a few more Black students. I don’t know what the percentage was, but it feels like maybe we were 5% of the school, something like that, but it was still overwhelmingly White. By that time the hormones were really firing and, you know, you want to date and socialize and everything, but there was no socializing across racial lines, no going to parties together, no nothing like that. And so it was a pretty lonely existence up there.

The robust social life Price had been expecting didn’t materialize, but his academic life was still top notch, despite receiving discouraging advice from some counselors still rooted in the past.

There were some holdovers from the segregation regime. For example, our guidance counselor was a holdover and very unhelpful. I remember going to see her to get advice about what colleges and universities I should apply to. And I’d done quite well at Coolidge. Fortunately, I had strong SAT scores. And she recommended a series of schools that were many, many, many notches below where I should be heading. And I said, “Well, okay, I don’t need advice like this.”

That wasn’t the only instance where those doing the testing did not recognize the intellectual acumen Hugh Price displayed.

I also was selected for a summer internship at a Defense Department subcontractor named the Operations Research Office. And it was for kids who were strong in math and science. I was the first Black student ever to be selected for it. This was during the summer between junior and senior years. They gave us a test for what our prospects were, and they told me that based on the test I probably would get to go to college, but I shouldn’t count on going to graduate school or professional school. It was awful. That rattled my cage. I told my parents and they said, “Don’t pay any attention, just keep on moving.” That was one of my early exposures to the abuse and misuse of tests.

Price absorbed all the lessons, both in the classroom and in the wider world, and was ready to strike out.

I just wanted to get the hell out of town. I wanted it over, I wanted to go north, I wanted to get out of the reach of segregation and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Just tough it out and do what you have to do.

After graduation Price did go north, to Amherst and Yale and a long, distinguished career, culminating with his leadership of the National Urban League.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Hugh Price if, outside of school, he had fun growing up here.

As the demographics of the neighborhood changed, a number of friends who were my age or a year or two younger than me moved into the neighborhood. We had people to socialize with. I loved baseball, so I played a lot of baseball at Taft. We played in the Summer League, played down in Turkey Thicket, and all around the city. I loved going over to Holy Name and playing basketball on the fence, and we played over there in the summer when we weren’t playing down at Taft or elsewhere around the city. I was only in Brookland for six years. I moved there in ’54 and headed off to college in ’59. But yeah I had a pretty good experience there.

In 2017 Hugh Price published a well-received memoir that includes many stories about growing up in Washington and covers the full scope of his extraordinary life. I highly recommend it. Click on the image below to go to Amazon.

Sources:

Beauchamps, Tanya Edward, National Register of Historic Places nomination, Public School Buildings of Washington D.C., 1862-1960, 2001

Harris, Adam, The Limits of Desegregation in Washington, D.C., Atlantic Magazine, September 2020

Knoll, Erwin, The Truth About Desegregation in the Washington, D.C. Public Schools, The Journal of Negro Education, Spring 1959

Knoll, Erwin, Desegregation’s Tortuous Course: Washington: Showcase of Integration, Commentary Magazine, March 1959

Price, Hugh, This African American Life, John F. Blair, Winston-Salem, NC, 2017