The wall around Girard College
Opened 1848; first Black students admitted 11 September 1968Girard College, Girard and Corinthian Avenues, North Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA
Stephen Girard left $2 million for a school for "poor white male orphans" and ordered a ten-foot wall built around it. For 120 years it stood in the middle of Black North Philadelphia and admitted no Black child.
Stephen Girard was the richest man in America when he died in 1831. His will left about $2 million to build and endow a residential school in Philadelphia for "poor white male orphans", and specified, among much else, that a wall ten feet high and fourteen inches thick should enclose the forty-three-acre campus - to keep the boys in, and the city out. The school opened in 1848.
The neighbourhood around it became Black over the following century. The wall did not change. By the 1950s Girard College was a walled, publicly administered, whites-only institution sitting inside one of the largest Black neighbourhoods in the United States, and its own trustees were appointed by the City of Philadelphia - which is what eventually made it a constitutional question rather than a private eccentricity.
In 1953 E. Washington Rhodes offered legal help to Black parents trying to enrol their sons, and Raymond Pace Alexander put a resolution before City Council. In 1957 the US Supreme Court held that running the school through a city agency on a racial restriction violated the Fourteenth Amendment - and the trustees simply handed administration to a private board and carried on. Cecil B. Moore, the president of the Philadelphia NAACP, took it to the wall itself: picketing began on the evening of 1 May 1965 and ran continuously for seven months, ending with a rally at the main gate on 17 December. Roy Wilkins addressed the pickets in June; Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in August.
The courts came round in 1968, and on 11 September that year Girard College admitted four African American boys and two Asian American boys. The wall is still there. It is the plainest object on this map: a physical barrier, built to a dead man's instructions, that kept Black children out of an endowed school in their own neighbourhood for a hundred and twenty years.
A ten-foot wall around a forty-three-acre campus, closed to Black children for 120 years. The shape traces the walled campus, drawn indicatively.
Sources
- Girard CollegeEncyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, Rutgers-Camdenphiladelphiaencyclopedia.orgDavid A. Canton. Backs the will's $2 million for "poor white male orphans", the ten-foot, fourteen-inch wall around the forty-three-acre campus, the 1848 opening, the 1957 and 1968 Supreme Court rulings, Cecil B. Moore's campaign and the admission of six boys on 11 September 1968.
- The Desegregation of Girard CollegeCivil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, Temple University Librariesexhibits.temple.eduTemple's documentary history of the campaign, including the seven months of picketing from 1 May to 17 December 1965 and the speakers who came to the wall.