North Division High School had always been a staple in Milwaukee’s Black community.
But a Jan. 19, 1976, order by federal Judge John Reynolds for Milwaukee Public Schools to desegregate almost changed that.
The ruling led MPS to propose changes three years later with the goal to integrate the 97% Black North Side high school.
The solution? Close North Division as the neighborhood knew it and reopen it as a citywide magnet school for medical and science technology. Magnet schools offer special instruction and programs that are typically not available elsewhere.
The district had utilized a similar strategy in the years prior to integrate Rufus King High School and Golda Meir School by changing them to magnet schools.
The proposal for North Division would integrate the school by drawing more white students from other parts of the city but would also limit enrollment options for students in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Residents quickly fought back, organizing the Coalition to Save North Division.
Howard Fuller, who led the Coalition, remembers the community’s reaction when the plan was first announced.
“We ended up filling up the auditorium at the board meeting at Central Office,” said Fuller, who went on to become superintendent of MPS from 1991 to 1995. “That’s when I gave the speech and ended by saying ‘enough is enough.’ That then became the slogan for the Coalition to Save North.”
Fuller said the group organized marches, meetings, canvassed across the neighborhood and eventually took legal action and won.
Desegregation at MPS
Lawyer and politician Lloyd Barbee, among others, filed a lawsuit against the Milwaukee Public School Board of Directors in 1965 to desegregate MPS, Milwaukee historian and author James Nelsen said.
The suit alleged that the district’s policy of assigning students to their neighborhood school maintained school segregation because of the widespread residential segregation across the city.
The case ran until 1976, when Reynolds ruled that Milwaukee Public Schools needed to take action to desegregate the district.
Reynolds then established a monitoring board to enforce and oversee districtwide desegregation plans.
Nelsen said shortly before the ruling, the Board of Directors welcomed new superintendent Lee McMurrin, who had implemented magnet schools in Toledo, Ohio.
Once he came to Milwaukee, McMurrin pushed to rebrand some neighborhood high schools as magnet schools, encouraging students from across the city to go to different schools.
When a new North Division building opened in 1978 the district tried attracting white students to the school but was unsuccessful.
This, in combination with low performing grades at the school, led McMurrin to target North Division to become the city’s newest magnet school. The school would open a medical and science technology program for high schoolers across the city.
“We’re not satisfied with the results at North Division,” McMurrin said in a 1979 Milwaukee Sentinel article. “We will not have a change about unless we make it a brand new school.”
Community pushes back
Fuller, students and the neighborhood had major concerns about the new plan.
“The thing that concerned me the most was that once they built the brand-new building, then the first thing they were going to do then was to put all of the neighborhood kids out,” Fuller said. “In part, it was also a pushback against the way that desegregation was being implemented in the city at that time.”
North Division’s student council organized a rally in which 400 students walked out of school and marched to the Central Office in protest, according to local news reports.
The plan would close enrollment to freshmen and sophomores. Willie Washington, then a North Division junior, spoke out against the plan during the protest.
“We feel that we should not be used as guinea pigs for integration,” Washington told the Milwaukee Journal.
Fuller said the coalition spent the summer going door to door in the neighborhood, held community meetings and built a parent group.
When the new school year started in September 1979, Fuller and over 200 students gathered for a mass meeting on North Division’s front lawn. Fuller told students to study hard and “demand that they be educated.”
After months of protesting, Fuller said, the coalition escalated to legal action through the monitoring board, established to observe desegregation efforts.
Success at a cost
Fuller said the Board of Directors eventually reached an out-of-court settlement and dropped the plan.
“It was the first battle where the board reversed its decision on closing a school in the Black community because all of the protests before had never gained any traction,” Fuller said.
The school would remain a neighborhood school but also offer a career specialty program, according to the settlement.
The agreement said the school should aim for about 2,000 students, 60% Black and 40% white. A set number of seats would be set aside for non-Black students and Black students could not fill those spots.
As those changes were implemented, problems at North Division High School continued, Fuller said.
Fuller said nobody knew he would eventually become a superintendent of MPS. When he took on the role in 1991, he gained access to documents and information nobody thought he would see.
An assistant superintendent at the time told him that the board had taken actions to sabotage North Division after the coalition won.
“Some of the problems that exist at North today can be traced back to the conscious attempt to sabotage North once we won in court,” Fuller said. “There was such anger on the part of the administration that they had to do this.”
For example, Fuller said the coalition worked with North Division Principal Bob Jasna to set up a program and curriculum for the school, then replaced Jasna with a middle school principal who knew nothing about the work he and Fuller did.
“That sabotaged the entire effort that we had made,” Fuller said.
Today, North Division High School remains predominately Black — 90.5%, according to the latest state report card. The school scored an overall 54.9 on the report card, meeting few expectations, according to the Wisconsin Department of Education.
“For me, this struggle around North Division has never ended,” Fuller said. “It’s been ongoing for 30, 40 years.”
Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
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