Tulsa::History: April 2014 Archives
A 2008 doctoral dissertation on Tulsa's Booker T. Washington High School's early years as a magnet school. P. 24 includes a timeline of Tulsa's desegregation process.
School Desegregation in Tulsa, Oklahoma: August 1977
A report of the Oklahoma Advisory Committee to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights. The advisory committee was chaired by State Rep. Hannah Atkins of Oklahoma City, and members included vice chairman Earl D. Mitchell of Stillwater, William C. Brown, Mrs. William V. Carey, and Richard Vallejo of Oklahoma City, Nancy G. Feldman, Patty P. Eaton, and June Echo-Hawk of Tulsa, William R. Carmack, Patricia A. Davis, and Jerry Muskrat of Norman, John H. Nelson of Lawton, Caryl Taylor of Okmulgee, and Stephen Jones of Enid.
The document has many tables and maps that provide a snapshot of Tulsa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including a table of the racial and ethnic distribution of student population in each school for 1975-1976. The appendix contains maps showing the Tulsa Public Schools attendance districts in 1976, including proposed school sites and schools (like Irving, Lombard, Horace Mann, Longfellow, Jefferson, Charles Johnson, and McBirney) that had already been closed down).
There is an extended discussion of the history of desegregation, including changes made following the 1970 10th Circuit decision and the birth of Tulsa's first magnet schools.
The report contains a significant historical error on p. 3: "The area which had been a black residential section prior to the riot became the industrial and wholesale center of the city." While that was the plan of Tulsa's white city leadership, the district court invalidated the fire ordinance that would have zoned African-Americans out of rebuilding their neighborhood, and Greenwood was rebuilt where it had been before the riot.
10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, handed down on July 28, 1970, ruling against the Tulsa school districts implementation of racial desegregation. The Tulsa district was represented by C. H. Rosenstein and David L. Fist, whose firm continued to represent Tulsa and many other districts for decades. The Northern District of Oklahoma approved Tulsa's policies, but the appeals court found that in Tulsa's "neighborhood schools" system, attendance districts were drawn to coincide with segregated housing patterns, even when it meant higher costs for the district and longer distances for children to travel to school.
Of historical interest, the decision includes some school statistics, and mentions of schools long vanished, like Charles Johnson Elementary and Osage Elementary, Several schools that had been all-white just 15 years before had transitioned to between 78% and 99% black -- Burroughs, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman.
