In the 1950s the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) was run by an all white school board and central office staff which didn’t really deal with the changing racial makeup of the city and its schools. A few minority teachers were hired but they only taught in the schools with large minority enrollments.
By 1960 de facto segregation existed in Berkeley’s elementary schools (Kindergarten through sixth grades) with about 92 percent of African American students attending just six of the fourteen elementary schools in Berkeley. The segregation was due to the fact that whites lived in the hills and the more well to do northern and eastern areas of the city while African Americans lived in the flat lands and the poorer southern and western areas of the city. Twenty five percent of the Berkeley’s elementary school children scored in the bottom ten percent of national standardized tests while a third of the children scored in the top ten percent of the same tests. It’s not difficult to figure out which children scored in which decile.
Problems were really apparent at the junior high level, seventh through ninth grades. Berkeley had three junior high schools, Garfield on the north side of the city, on Rose street a little west of Grove street, Willard on the south side of the city on Stuart street at Telegraph Avenue, half a dozen blocks south of the University of California, and Burbank on the west side of the city, on University near San Pablo Avenue. Garfield was essential all white drawing its students from the well to do hill areas. Willard was relatively well integrated and consisted of mainly middle class students. Burbank consisted of almost all minority students and they were from the lower socio-economic areas of the city.
By the early 1960s it became apparent that something had to be done to address the segregation in Berkeley’s public schools. The question was how best to approach the problem. Those involved came to the conclusion that issues in the later grades were going to be very difficult to address and that it would be much easier to address the problem at the elementary school level first.
After a couple years of committees and discussions and planning the school board decided to implement a desegregation program that would occur over a period of approximately ten years. The plan however, would require large scale busing at the elementary school level, and whites were not largely supportive of the concept. Therefore, in November 1963 the elementary school desegregation plan was postponed, and redrawing the boundary lines for the city’s three junior high schools was proposed. However, many whites in the hills strongly opposed that proposal as well. Ultimately, a compromise was reached where Burbank junior high would became a city wide ninth grade school, and Willard and Garfield junior highs would become seventh and eighth grade schools, and seventh and eighth grade students from Burbank would attend Garfield. The plan was implemented for the 1964-65 school year.
Things went relatively smoothly at Willard and Burbank in the fall of 1964, but at Garfield there were problems. White parents from the hills perceived that the academics at Garfield were in decline and the children from Burbank were treated as outsiders. The children from Burbank felt they lost their school and were suddenly placed in an unwelcoming environment. The situation remained difficult at Garfield for many years.
Meanwhile, in 1965 planning resumed for desegregation of the Berkeley’s elementary schools, which still involved busing a large number of elementary school children. Ultimately, it was decided that grades one through three would be taught in the schools in the hills and grades four through six would be taught in the flats. Finally in the fall of 1968 Berkeley undertook the first significant non-court ordered busing in the country as elementary school children in grades one through six who lived in far away parts of the city were bused to their assigned schools (Kindergarteners attended their local school).
The relatively difficult busing of elementary school children actually went much more smoothly than the desegregation of the junior high schools had gone four years earlier. A significant reason that things went relatively smoothly with the desegregation of the elementary schools was the different makeup of the students and their families by the fall of 1968 from that of 1964. In the four years between September 1964 and September 1968 families who were opposed to the integration plans left the district and moved to places such as Orinda, Moraga, and Lafayette, as well as other nearby East Bay towns. Families had four years either to accept the integration plan or to leave, and the integration plan did cause many white families who lived in the Berkeley hills to relocate to other suburbs.
School desegregation in Berkeley was effective at the elementary school level as well as at Willard and Burbank junior highs. However, it was not particularly successful at Garfield, and Berkeley High developed a lot of racial tension, despite the school desegregation at the lower grades, which lasted for many years.
The percentage of African American students in Berkeley public schools had gradually risen over the years from the 1940s until the mid-1960s when public school integration started. It then stopped increasing in Berkeley while it continued to increase in Oakland, directly adjacent and to the south of Berkeley.
Oakland’s white community opposed busing and they ceded control to African Americans of schools in the African American sections of the city which allowed the continuation of de facto school segregation in Oakland. It could be that some African American families didn’t want their children bused and preferred to send their children to local schools in Oakland, rather than to have them bused in the Berkeley school district.