The Froebel School Strikes of 1945

ED: We often associate youth movements with progressive politics. But our next story shows that’s not always the case. Gary, Indiana was once home to a thriving steel industry. The pool of jobs there created a diverse population in the early 20th century, including Eastern European immigrants and African-Americans. But simmering tensions between these white and black communities exploded on September 18, 1945.

That day, hundreds of students walked out of Froebel High. The strikers were white, the object of their protest? Their African-American classmates. Producer, Nina Earnest, has the story.

NINA EARNEST: According to local reports, the Froebel strike began after a fight broke out between black and white students at a football game. But racial tensions in Gary had been brewing for quite some time. Froebel was located in Gary Central District, the only integrated neighborhood in a very segregated city. As a result, Froebel was its only integrated school. Historian, Ronald Cohen, says that this was a point of contention for Froebel’s white student body.

RONALD COHEN: These were ethnic white students, Eastern European background. And they felt that they were being discriminated against that the richer white kids in Gary went to all white schools, but they were picked on because they were of ethnic ancestry.

NINA EARNEST: The more overt discrimination, however, was within Froebel itself.

CASEY PFEIFFER: When the school was built, it was really supposed to be this melting pot, this showcase integrated school.

NINA EARNEST: This is Casey Pfeiffer of the Indiana Historical Bureau.

CASEY PFEIFFER: But the school was internally segregated. So African-American students, though they walked the same halls as white students there, they could not attend the same classes or participate in many of the same extracurricular activities.

RONALD COHEN: Black students would be on the sports teams which were integrated, but otherwise they had a separate prom for the black students from the white students, they had two swimming pools in the building. But the swimming was segregated, so black students only swam on Friday before they cleaned the pool.

NINA EARNEST: Despite this inequality, it was the white students who decided to strike and air their grievances in 1945. As more and more black Southerners moved to Gary for wartime employment, and more black students enrolled at Froebel, the situation reached a tipping point. The white students, led by a boy named Leonard Lavenda, presented the school board with a few demands.

RONALD COHEN: What they wanted was that the school system remove all of the black students from Froebel and put them in other schools.

CASEY PFEIFFER: Students also wanted to house Principal Richard Newsome, who they believed was giving preferential treatment to African-American students.

NINA EARNEST: And lastly, that the Gary school board stopped treating students like guinea pigs and racial integration experiments. The student walkout elicited strong reactions in Gary and beyond. The working class white community and many of their parents backed the youth. But African-Americans, about a fifth of Gary’s population at that time, condemned them.

A black newspaper, called “The Indianapolis Recorder” reported that the African-American students at Froebel were deeply hurt and insulted by their classmate’s attitudes.

RONALD COHEN: It’s important to understand this comes just after World War II ends, which was the war fought for freedom, democracy, toleration, and so forth.

CASEY PFEIFFER: You know, here we were fighting against Hitlerism, Nazism, fascism abroad, and you come home to face inequality, race hatred here at home.

NINA EARNEST: This was not lost on the people of Gary. One journalist reminded–

JOURNALIST: “A negro student hurrying to his class in an all but deserted Froebel High last week during the hate strike of white students found time to turn and observe. My brother was killed overseas just six months ago fighting for this school and all the other fascists here.”

NINA EARNEST: The school board refused to remove black students from Froebel. Instead, its members promised to investigate the principal and put him on leave. The strikers returned to school in an uneasy truce. But Newsom was soon reinstated, and the white students walked out yet again on October 23. This time, they had a new demand.

CASEY PFEIFFER: So interestingly enough, the second time they basically say if we are going to be integrated, all schools in Gary should be integrated. It doesn’t make sense to have one and not the other.

NINA EARNEST: Pfeiffer and Cohen say this isn’t as much of an about face as it seems.

CASEY PFEIFFER: This goes back to the point from their initial strike when they said they no longer wanted to be guinea pigs.

RONALD COHEN: Right, they said you’re picking on us because we’re working class ethnics, and that’s not fair. So integrate the whole city.

NINA EARNEST: By this point, the Froebel hate strikes had attracted national attention, so much so that one of the biggest stars of the 20th century made a special stop in the troubled city.

FEMALE SPEAKER: [? Linen ?] skies today had a silver lining, and damp cold winds blew heart stirring melodies for thousands of teenage devotees of the King of Swoon, who came by plane this morning from New York City to croon Gary bobby soxers and their boyfriends into a democratic attitude on the race relations problem.

RONALD COHEN: Frank Sinatra was the most popular performer in the country, by far. And he was very liberal politically, and he believed strongly that the strike was wrong.

NINA EARNEST: Sinatra chatted with Froebel students, and of course performed for the town.

RONALD COHEN: The girls strikers were supposed to boycott. They said they’re not going to go and hear Frank. But some of them snuck in, they couldn’t miss a free Frank Sinatra concert.

NINA EARNEST: Sinatra warned the students about the Nazi technique of divide and conquer.

RONALD COHEN: And requested the strikers to school as a favor, and I shall be grateful to you. Now that didn’t go over too well.

NINA EARNEST: He also met privately with Leonard Levenda, the white student leader. Sinatra offered him a trip to New York to talk things through. Levenda told the crooner that he couldn’t be bought. Sinatra’s visit was extraordinary, but it didn’t accomplish very much. “Life Magazine,” which covered the event, said Frankie was, quote, “Deeply earnest at the high school meeting.”

FEMALE SPEAKER: First, he sang some songs. Then he made some vague references to the American way of life and the hot dog. When it was all over, Frankie had failed. The strike was still on.

NINA EARNEST: But the walkouts didn’t last for much longer. The strikers had a powerful enemy.

RONALD COHEN: The elite in Gary, which was the daily newspaper, “The Post Tribune,” the business community, the leadership from US steel, they were all very opposed to the strike.

NINA EARNEST: There were a few reasons for this. It was disruptive and there were fears of violence. For many residents, it was shameful. But it was also an image problem, especially in the wake of World War II. “The Gary Post Tribune” went so far as to call out the strikers families for their motives.

CASEY PFEIFFER: The article really makes it clear and says, “Fundamentally, this is not a school problem. This developed out of the changing population the Froebel area. As a result of this influx of Negro families, some white property owners feel their homes and churches have depreciated in value.” So this was a larger issue than what’s happening in the schools. Again, really underscoring the racial tension that was prevalent in the area. And not just in Gary, but in the North at this time.

NINA EARNEST: With the weight of public pressure, the school board cracked down on the student protesters.

CASEY PFEIFFER: If you are over 16, you face expulsion. If you’re under 16, your parents face legal action. They continue to press and press and press, and eventually the students do back down.

RONALD COHEN: The white community did not back them up, and so they couldn’t win.

NINA EARNEST: The white students went back to school in November, almost two months after they first walked out. The irony is that what is remembered as a hate strike had a positive outcome, at least on paper. In August 1946, the school board passed an anti-discrimination order that effectively integrated the school system.

CASEY PFEIFFER: You want to think that is a positive thing and how great the story would be if the students were going on strike because initially they wanted all schools to be integrated, and they were protesting segregation. But that’s really not what that was. And again, it goes back to why it was called a hate strike. It was unfortunate and it is contradictory to what, I think, many of us think of in terms of student activism.

At the same time, these students were taking a stand for something that they believed in. No matter how hard it might be for some of us to believe that that was happening at the time.

NINA EARNEST: Leonard Lavenda died in 1995. His brother told a local reporter that Leonard believed that school should be integrated and quote, “Through his efforts and those of other students, eventually all schools in Gary were.”

CASEY PFEIFFER: Now that’s all great when you dig deeper. Segregation and discrimination is continuing to happen.

NINA EARNEST: As hard as the city’s white elite fought against the student hate strike, they didn’t look at their own policies. They made few efforts to integrate the city as a whole. And without integrated neighborhoods, it’s hard to have integrated schools.

CASEY PFEIFFER: The white elite and establishment in Gary is OK in terms of having Froebel again as this showcase integrative example. But really when you look at community, no one’s really pushing the envelope too far to make sure that integration does happen.

NINA EARNEST: There’s an unexpected coda to this story. Gary remained a segregated city, but in the decades that followed, Froebel High School became much more to its alumni than the sight of a hate strike. Indiana State representative, Vernon Smith, graduated from Froebel in 1962. He says that less than 20 years after the walkout, conditions for black students had improved astronomically.

VERNON SMITH: I didn’t even think about segregation in high school. I mean, I thought about it when I got outside of those walls. There were certain sections of the city that we couldn’t live in. There were certain sections of the city we couldn’t be in after it got dark. So that was part of Gary’s history. It was segregated.

NINA EARNEST: But Froebel, he says, was a haven from that discrimination. The school board closed the school in 1977, despite protests, and the building was torn down in 2005. Today, it’s a park. Smith and his fellow alumni still reunite every year to celebrate their time at the school. He also worked with the state and Casey Pfeiffer’s office to ensure the location be remembered as a historical site.

VERNON SMITH: I firmly believe if you don’t tell your history and people don’t know your history, that you’re destined for it to repeat itself. And so we want the young people to know what happened there, and not just see it as a park. I can genuinely say that I love Froebel, so I’m going to do all I can to keep alive the memory and the worth of anything that I love. So the Froebel still lives.

ED: Nina Earnest is one of our producers. Ronald Cohen, Casey Pfeiffer, and Vernon Smith helped her tell this story. Cohen is Professor Emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest. Pfeiffer is a historian at the Indiana Historical Bureau. And Smith is a state representative of the Indiana legislature.

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