South Bend Washington High School Walkout

On September 20, 1968, 200 African American students staged a walkout at Washington High School in South Bend, Indiana. The walkout was a protest of the lack of representation of African Americans students in the school’s sports teams and extracurricular activities. The center of the conflict revolved around the fact that there was not a single African American cheerleader on Washington High School’s “all white” cheerleading squad. The walkout was organized and carried out by the Student Organization for Unity and Leadership (S.O.U.L.), a student-run organization that advocated for the representation of African American students in all areas of student life at Washington High School. Prior to the walkout, S.O.U.L. held two meetings to plan the demonstration at the LaSalle Park Center on Western Avenue. The pep assembly walkout involved many students and gained the attention of the South Bend African American newspaper The Reformer, where it made the front page of the September 29, 1968 edition.[1]

As one of the last Northern states to officially desegregate public schools, Indiana has a long history of racial inequality in its educational systems. The move to integrate public schools came in 1949, only five years preceding the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the Indiana General Assembly passed the Indiana School Desegregation Act in 1949.[2] Although the law required schools to start integrating, segregation persisted throughout the state due to residential zoning. South Bend’s public school system had never officially been segregated; however, the city enforced extremely discriminatory housing practices that made it very difficult for African Americans to become property owners, forced African American families into segregated neighborhoods, and perpetuated unofficial segregation in public schools.[3]

Even in school buildings that were officially integrated, African American students were often denied access to recreational facilities and discouraged from participating in school teams and clubs in South Bend.[4] These discriminatory practices caused African American students to feel unrepresented in their schools and culminated in a large public protest at Washington High School. In its coverage of the 1968 Washington High School walkout, The Reformer reported that one student demonstrator said, “We’ve been given frustration in place of equal representation.”[5] Despite the large African American population at Washington High School, African American students felt unable to participate fully in their school community. Marching out of the all-school pep assembly, over 200 students mobilized in order to upend the school’s prejudiced operations.

The year 1968 saw many school walkouts staged by students seeking to promote civil rights. The largest and most influential demonstration was the East Los Angeles School walkouts of March 1968.[6] It is likely that the 200 students who walked out of Washington High School on September 20, 1968 were inspired by this and similar walkouts earlier in the year.

[1] Val Maxwell, “Washington Students Stage Walkout,” The Reformer, September 29, 1968, 1.
[2] “A Look Back: Hoosier inequality,” South Bend Tribune, January 18, 2016, https://www.southbendtribune.com/news/local/history/a-look-back-hoosier-inequality/article_14aff11b-7be0-5594-a12d-499a0c02e67d.html
[3] Annette Scherber, “’Better Homes wants to have a fair shake:’ Fighting Housing Discrimination in Postwar South Bend,” Indiana History Blog, last modified May 18, 2017, https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/housing/
[4] “Segregation in South Bend,” St. Joseph County Public Library, accessed June 1, 2020, https://sjcpl.org/node/7579.
[5] Maxwell, “Washington Students Stage Walkout,” 1.
[6] “The Walkout — How a Student Movement in 1968 Changed Schools Forever (Part 1 Of 3),” United Way Greater Los Angeles, last modified February 26, 2018, https://www.unitedwayla.org/en/news-resources/blog/1968Walkouts/.

Student Author: Natalie Bradshaw
Faculty/Staff Editors: Dr. Ronald V. Morris, Dr. Kevin C. Nolan, and Christine Thompson
Graduate Assistant Researchers: Carrie Vachon and JB Bilbrey

PHOTO & VIDEO:
Washington High School South Bend 2015, attributed to IH Havens, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_High_School_South_Bend_2015.jpg