The chapters from Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School detail the creation of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, and the factors that induced its creation.

There was a boom in children attending school during the Great Depression. “By the end of the 1930s [in the country], roughly 73 percent of fourteen-to seventeen-year-olds were attending high school, up from just over half at the start of the Depression” (112). Students were staying in school instead of competing in the competitive job market, because the youth market collapsed. These students were usually from immigrant backgrounds. Schools filled up and often became overcrowded.

In districts with an absence of high schools, local leaders worried that children would be tempted into misbehaving because they didn’t have jobs or schools to attend. There was no senior high school accessible to boys who lived in the lower Bronx or Upper East Side of Manhattan. Leonard Covello, future principal of Benjamin Franklin High School, wrote that boys “turn to the street for recreation and activity which is often of an undesirable nature” (115). The vision for Benjamin Franklin High School was that it would be “a school for all children of all the people” (115). However, its attendance zone was drawn “to avoid a large influx of Negroes from the Central Harlem District” (117) despite the fact that overcrowding had already funneled Black students into less desirable (“unzoned, older”) buildings and essentially created segregated schools.

The chapter explains that, while Covello is known for his social justice efforts, “… their strategy may have played unwittingly into a larger pattern of restricted access for blacks to upper Manhattan high schools” (117). The statement seems modest because America as a country has historically restricted Black people from access to not just schools but also jobs and neighborhoods, which we’ve been discussing in class. Authors Johnek and Puckett stress that they were reluctant to consider “any ulterior motive” for drawing district lines to exclude Black students from attending the high school (117), but there was never a real reason for why to intentionally manipulate the racial makeup of the school to exclude Black students.