The Gym and the Color Line

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Indianapolis high school gymnasiums and football fields, and on the one civic instrument that decides who plays in them: the school district line. Indiana builds the largest high school gyms in the United States, and it built Crispus Attucks High School in 1927 as the segregated Black high school for a city whose school board had been asked to build it. Attucks was kept out of the state tournament until 1942, sat on 8.4 acres when the state's own formula asked for more than three times that, and then won the state championship in 1955, 1956 and 1959. The building type is the hook. The boundary is the lesson. You will read three court opinions directly, United States v. Board of School Commissioners (1971 and 1974) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974), and watch a federal judge find that more than ninety percent of about 350 attendance-zone changes promoted segregation, watch the 1969 Unigov statute expand a city's limits while expressly leaving its school district where it was, and watch the Supreme Court turn the district line into a wall the remedy could not cross. Then you will test that argument against a chronology, correct two claims this course could not verify, look up a real school's district and its boundary in the federal and state records, and write about one gym. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route (the method) and Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It (course 1, the same metro). A 360 tour of the gyms and fields is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is captured.