Separated By Zoning: Neighboring Schools In San Antonio Kept Segregated For Decades San Antonio Express-News
Separated By Zoning: Neighboring Schools In San Antonio Kept Segregated For Decades – San Antonio Express-News https://bexarcountynewsonline.com/separated-by-zoning-neighboring-schools-in-san-antonio-kept-segregated-for-decades-san-antonio-express-news/
Oct. 1, 2022Updated: Oct. 1, 2022 12:41 p.m.
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Students at McKinley Elementary School, shown here in 1962, attended one of the smallest schools in the San Antonio Independent School District, only a block away from another small school, Gonzales Elementary.
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The San Antonio Independent School District, its headquarters are shown here in 1972, grew out of the original city public-school system.
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President William McKinley, who visited San Antonio in 1901, was the namesake of a local elementary school from 1915 through 1975. A 1921 student report says he was recognized for the “tact and sincerity” of his administration.
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A 1970 map of SAISD elementary-school boundaries, published in the San Antonio Express, shows attendance zones for the district’s schools.
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I attended McKinley Elementary School in the 1950s and ’60s. Until 1961, McKinley had six grades and five teachers. That meant that grades were combined. I remember it as a small but fun school. We had recesses morning and afternoon — I guess so we could run off some energy — and lunch/recess at around noon.
Just down the street, there was a new, much more modern Gonzalez Elementary. I understood it had six grades and six teachers (and was) very progressive. But although I begged to attend there, I attended McKinley. Only when we moved to Northwood Elementary was I introduced into what I thought was a huge elementary school, with enough teachers for three classes in each grade, a librarian, an occasional nurse and PE teachers.
Can you tell me any more about McKinley and how there came to be two schools on one street?
— Susan Porr
In the prologue to “Romeo and Juliet” — trust me, this relates — Shakespeare introduces the Montague and Capulet families as “two households, both alike in dignity.” That’s what you’d think these two elementary schools were — McKinley in the 400 block of East Magnolia Avenue and Gonzales in the 500 block of the same street. Cheek by jowl, separate but equal, right? But for most of the 40 years they coexisted, they were too close for comfort — until they finally got together in their last act.
Fittingly, the schools had separate beginnings.
Built in 1915, the original McKinley School at South Brazos Street and Durango (now César E. Chávez) Boulevard, as mentioned in last Sunday’s column , was repurposed in 1923 as one of the city’s original junior high schools, Sidney Lanier, later a junior-senior and now a senior high school.
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When the building was remodeled, on the recommendation of Jeremiah Rhodes, superintendent of San Antonio public schools, “The manual training and household arts laboratories (were) made larger … owing to the type of community it will serve,” as reported in the San Antonio Express, Feb. 16, 1923. That area was often referred to as “the Mexican section.”
McKinley School was named after President William McKinley, who visited San Antonio on May 4, 1901, a few months before his Sept. 6, 1901, assassination. A project by Bowie Elementary School students, compiling details on the namesakes of all local schools, says McKinley was recognized for his “great tact and deep sincerity … in his administration of governmental affairs,” as quoted in the San Antonio Light, May 15, 1921.
His name was imported to the school you attended, which had been planned since 1922, when the “Dr. E.O. Evans” lot was bought at a cost of $22,000 — several thousand more and as much as double the cost of other lots acquired for schools at the same time. Members of the school board agreed that it was “the only practicable site in the community,” as reported in the Express, Oct. 4, 1922. When new McKinley, also known as School No. 29, opened in 1924, it served grades one through four, adding fifth and sixth grades later in the decade.
The school board decided to build what was first called the Rock Quarry School on property between Rural and Broad avenues near the rock quarry-turned-dump that was later restyled as the Mexican Village tourist attraction in Brackenridge Park ( discussed here Dec. 17, 2016 ).
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To relieve overcrowding at Eleanor Brackenridge Elementary School, “the need (was) very pressing, (so) there should be no delay in breaking ground for the structure,” said the Light, Dec. 7. 1907. “It was pointed out that many of the children of that locality would not attend school unless there was one in their neighborhood.”
The price of this lot went unreported, but the most expensive in the massive tract — unloaded just before the turn of the century in a sheriff’s sale — went for a tenth of the property where McKinley was built.
A two-room school was built and equipped with chairs and desks; a janitor was hired; and the new school opened in September 1907. The new school, No. 25, had two namesakes, according to the Bowie students — Rafael Gonzales, proponent of Mexican independence and former governor of Texas and Coahuila; and Jose Mario Gonzales, “a distinguished Mexican who joined the Texas Army with a number of his countrymen (and whose) addresses helped hold the people to the flag.”
The differences between the two schools grew more pronounced as time passed.
In 1935, the school board commissioned a survey of city schools from University of Texas professors. They found “the most serious deficiencies … in elementary school buildings,” according to their report, excerpted in the Light, July 19, 1935. “In the poorest,” they concluded, “practically nothing is provided except for the fundamental subjects. The range of difference between the best … and the poorest, such as Gonzales … is startling.”
At Gonzales, the profs found a “muddy site (that) needs surfacing and walks. Outside toilets (were in) poor condition.” They suggested that “all frame structures should be removed, and brick structures remodeled and expanded.” The former Rock Quarry school was singled out as the “worst plant in the system.” The survey found no problems at McKinley and recommended that its site “would permit expansion and relieve Gonzales School.”
The experts conceded that it was San Antonio’s right “to decide for itself what relative school accommodations it would provide for different races and peoples.” But professionalism went in another direction: “To the educator, however, the only recognizable difference is that of need, which is usually greatest among the underprivileged group.”
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As the Depression decade dragged on, McKinley won first prize for having the most “five-point children” three years in a row. This was a statewide program, administered locally by the Bexar County Medical Society, that ranked schoolchildren on five qualities, some more subjective than others. A five-point child would hit satisfying metrics on each of the following — having received their diphtheria and smallpox shots, scholarship, “right attitude” and “freedom from curable physical defects.”
Gonzales never placed in this contest, but McKinley was awarded a silver cup to keep in 1938 after presenting the most five-point children three years in a row.
At least one of the survey recommendations was followed at Gonzales — sort of, and it was 12 years later. A dilapidated, one-room brick building dating back to the 1900s was not refurbished but abandoned in 1947 as beyond economical repair. Over the next year, a new eight-room building was constructed, and the cafeteria was remodeled. This would be the newer building you remember and the one that is still in use today.
Tensions, predictably, developed between the two student populations, not so much Montagues and Capulets as pint-size Sharks and Jets.
“A difficult situation has flared up between Anglo students at McKinley Elementary and a group of Latin students at Gonzales Elementary School,” says the Express, Dec. 19, 1951, in a story about a report by the city’s Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment Committee. To solve this problem, the committee proposed redevelopment of “a small slum area immediately east of North St. Mary’s Street on East Craig and extending to the western edge of Brackenridge Golf Course,” wiping out an existing neighborhood and rebuilding it as a “community shopping center and apartment area.”
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For all their years of queasy coexistence, the two schools were examples of de facto segregation — where the policy is not codified but accomplished by strategically drawn boundaries.
This didn’t go unnoticed. Philip J. Montalbo — a local attorney and member of the Good Neighbor Commission, a state agency founded to improve conditions for Mexicans living in Texas — called out the San Antonio Independent School District for operating Gonzales and McKinley as segregated schools. “Last year, all students in the Gonzales School were of Mexican descent,” he said, as quoted in the Express, Aug. 29, 1964. “At McKinley, all students were Anglo except 20 Latins.”
The assistant superintendent for elementary schools, Raymond Arnold, replied that attendance was determined by zones, so that students living within a particular zone had to attend the school designated for that area — with no word on how zone boundaries were determined.
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