This week in Philly history: Girard College quietly admits first Black students
Sept. 11, 1968: After a lawsuit and years of demonstrations — and sometimes-violent confrontations with police — four little boys made history when they reported for their first day of second grade.
By the afternoon of Sept. 11, 1968, the hostility had faded.
Neither the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nor Cecil B. Moore was making rousing speeches outside Girard College’s wrought-iron front gates.
No human barricade of police officers blocked the entrance, and no civil rights groups marched through North Philadelphia.
After a brutal fight to desegregate the private boarding school, which started with an intense seven-month demonstration and then spent years tied up in the court system, the color barrier was pierced without protest.
Four little boys, dressed in suits and ties and carrying their favorite board games, walked to the front door of marble-faced Founder’s Hall at 21st Street and College Avenue, and reported for their first day of second grade.
Mothers and grandmothers and siblings accompanied each child, and a gaggle of photographers and reporters attempting to capture the otherwise-calm moment circled each family.
“Nice place,” 11-year-old William Lenzy Dade told The Inquirer, “I didn’t expect it.”
The school was the brainchild of French merchant Stephen Girard, a childless entrepreneur who amassed an immense wealth in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Upon his death in 1831, he set aside a then-fortune of $2 million to start a boarding school for “poor, white, male orphans.” The school opened in 1848, and offered a premium education at no cost to select students whose families had a single guardian.
By the 1960s, the campus’ imposing stone walls became a metaphorical obstacle to the enclosed white-columned buildings. Moore, then the Philadelphia NAACP president, led the charge and a lawsuit to force Girard to desegregate. In 1965, the animosity escalated into sometimes-violent confrontations with police. But demonstrators continued undaunted, singing and chanting and marching so those four boys could be the first Black students admitted to the private school.
Owen Gowans III was 7 when he walked through those gates in his bright, green-and-brown plaid jacket, the last of the four to arrive.
“Are you nervous?” a reporter asked.
He just shook his head.
In 2015, as part of an anniversary celebration of the school’s integration, Gowans found the words.
“I’m just humbled by what transpired,” he told The Inquirer. “I’m appreciative to the people who put up with beatings and bad words so people like me could go to school here.”