A Historical Case Study Of An All-Black High School In Pre-Brown Charlotte, North Carolina From 1960-1969

While the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision may have overturned the legal practice of race-based segregation in public schools on the basis of separate being “inherently unequal”, the promise of equality for Black students in the United States has yet to materialize (Noguera et al., 2015). Sixty-seven years removed from the Brown decision and 50 years after Swann v. CMS, African American students are still faring worse than their white counterparts by nearly every conceivable metric and the composition of many schools throughout the nation have actually moved rapidly in the direction of resegregation (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 2018). Despite the dominant narrative of segregated Black schools as wholly inadequate, there are counternarratives of them producing educational excellence, racial pride and serving as pillars in the African American community. Second Ward High School was the first Black public secondary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and located in the historic Black neighborhood called “Brooklyn”. It was closed in the wake of desegregation. This investigation of Second Ward High School utilizes a historical case study method through the theoretical framework of Community Cultural Wealth to better understand the institutional assets segregated Black schools in the urban South endowed to their student populations during the period of 1960-1969.