The Berwyn School Fight

In nineteen thirty-two, the Tredyffrin and Easttown school districts in Chester County quietly began segregating their elementary schools, separating Black children from white classmates for the first time. What happened next was one of the earliest and most effective civil rights school boycotts in American history.

Black families and their supporters gathered at Mount Zion AME Church, just down the road from here in Devon, and organized a coordinated refusal to send their children to segregated classrooms. The boycott lasted through the school year and into the next, keeping the affected children out of the segregated classrooms for nearly two years.

The sacrifice worked. School officials backed down and rescinded the segregation order. By nineteen thirty-four the children returned to integrated schools. The Berwyn fight did not stop there. It helped pave the way for the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Bill of nineteen thirty-five, giving the state one of the country's earlier legislative protections against racial discrimination in public accommodations, nearly two decades before Brown v. Board of Education.