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Jones School Students Square Dancing
This photograph depicts a racially-integrated school dance for students attending the Jones School in 1949. During this era, the school was involved in early attempts to integrate primary education by offering busing for white students from towns just north of Washtenaw county (Jones School, n.d.) (Monagan, 2019).
Liberal Talk Not Enough to Change Schools’ Image
This article describes the state of educational segregation in Ann Arbor’s primary educational system in the 1980s. Mirroring the history of the school district from almost exactly twenty years prior, the Ann Arbor Board of Education established a Committee on Excellence to reassess how racial disparities continued to pervade the system. Of particular note are the mentions on page 1 of consistent rejections by the Board of proposed racial integration plans and on page 2 of the relationship between ongoing housing disparities and the educational system.
All The Tables from Citizens’ School Report
In this newspaper clipping from 1964, the Ann Arbor News visualizes statistics from a report of the Ann Arbor Board of Education’s Citizens’ Committee, which was established to investigate how race was shaping the student populations of and educational experiences at various city schools (Jones School, n.d.). This article, one of six to be printed in the Ann Arbor News, reveals the ongoing segregation and racial violence enacted against Black students through the city’s primary education system. (All The Tables From Citizens’ School Report, n.d.). Notable statistics include the overwhelming separation of Black students into the Jones and Mack schools (which reported that Black students comprised respectively 75.4% and 41.1% of their student populations), as well as the educational neglect of Black students across the school system in regards to grades. The publication of the report these statistics come from ultimately led to broad support by civil rights groups and Black families in the North Central area to close the Jones School, as well as to restructure the city’s education system (Jones School, n.d.). It is important to note that absent from these statistics is contextualizing information about racism in the school system, such as the experience of Black students.
Teenage Baseball Players at Jones School
This photograph depicts an all-Black baseball team at the Jones School in 1939. The Jones School, now Community High School, is described as an "anchor" of what was known as the North Central area of Ann Arbor, a historically Black neighborhood in present-day Kerrytown (Jones School, n.d.). While it was open, the school served as a site for food drives, donation efforts, and recreational programs for Black students living in the area (Jones School, n.d.). In 1963, the Ann Arbor Board of Education formed a 12-member Citizens’ Committee to study and provide statistics about the dynamics of race, specifically in regards to the racial composition of student populations, in Ann Arbor public schools (Jones School, n.d.). Through the report that the Committee created and released the following year, the Jones School was determined a de facto' segregated school by the Ann Arbor Board of Education and subsequently closed due to community pressure (Jones School, n.d.). More broadly, the work of the Committee spurred action to address segregation across the city’s school system (Jones School, n.d.).
Parents Take Over School Head's Office in Willow Village
This newspaper clipping describes a demonstration by parents of students in the Willow Village school district, which covered an area developed in between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti alongside the World War II era Willow Run factory (Sherman & Shackman, 1995)(Four Willow Run Schools Care For Great Influx, n.d.). Black parents of students in the system had organized themselves with the help of Rev. David A. Blake Jr. of Bethel A.M.E. Church to protest the potential move of Black students from the integrated Ross school to the segregated Simmonds school.