Desegregation of Pennsylvania Schools

In September of eighteen eighty, a man named Elias Allen walked his two children to the South Ward schools in this Crawford County community and tried to enroll them. The school turned them away because they were Black, under an eighteen fifty-four Pennsylvania law that required separate schools for Black children. Allen refused to accept the decision.

He appealed to the Crawford County Court of Common Pleas, and Judge Pearson Church ruled the segregation law unconstitutional. The Pennsylvania legislature responded by amending the statute, and effective July fourth, eighteen eighty-one, segregation of public schools in Pennsylvania was formally prohibited by law. This quiet act of a father insisting his children had the right to learn alongside their neighbors set a precedent nearly three-quarters of a century before the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v.

Board of Education.