The Chicago Defender newspaper of May 5, 1945, may have summed it up best: "In short, the Springfield Plan's success will be measured ... when today's children become citizens and community leaders in the brighter world of tomorrow."
John Lockwood As the 1930s wound down, some three generations after the end of the Civil War, segregation was still thoroughly embedded in American life.
Segregation was not dismantled until the 1950s and 1960s. There were, however, a few places across America where people didn't feel like waiting that long. Springfield was one of them.
In 1939, the National Conference of Christians and Jews suggested the city adopt a program to educate its schoolchildren against ethnic and racial prejudice, starting in kindergarten and continuing all the way through high school. The project's founders and administrators later explained that they chose Springfield first for a pilot program, out of all the United States, because of the existence of several civil rights groups already operating there.
At this time, Springfield had a population of 160,000 people, including 5,000 African-Americans.
The fight against bigotry came to be known as the Springfield Plan. The students would be taught tolerance in regular classroom settings, but also during special projects in and out of the classroom, where everyone would work together. The children were also encouraged to bring in items for show and tell about their own cultures and ancestral languages.
Adults weren't left out, either. Teachers were surveyed for their attitudes toward various groups, and attended special seminars. Parents were brought into the plan at Parent-Teacher Association meetings and special forums.
Efforts were also made to lobby against prejudice in the local job market, so that all Springfield students would have an equal chance, though this part of the project seems to have been only partially successful.
The Springfield Plan proved popular enough to be adopted by other American cities during the next few years, though apparently not in the South, including places such as Pittsburgh, New York City, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati.
It also appeared in various media outlets, including Newsweek, Woman's Home Companion, the Harvard Educational Review, and the March of Time. In 1945, it was even written up as a book, "The Story of the Springfield Plan," by Clarence I. Chatto and Alice L. Halligan. This writer read through a copy at the U.S. Library of Congress.
Hollywood also took note.
In 1945, it released a one reel, or 20-minute, movie short, "It Happened in Springfield." It was distributed to 10,000 theaters. Rather oddly, perhaps, the target of prejudice in the movie is a Scandinavian-American, rather than an African-American or a Jewish- American, for example.
Also, the movie makers removed from the final print a scene showing an African-American woman teacher in a mostly white classroom. Even so, the Springfield superintendent of schools, John Grandrud, urged all the Springfield school teachers to go and see it.
What lasting effect did the Springfield Plan have? Well, admittedly, this writer has not been able to find any media references to the plan after 1948. Perhaps it slowly petered out after that, or maybe it became a part of the much larger civil rights struggle that would soon end segregation once and for all.
The Chicago Defender newspaper of May 5, 1945, may have summed it up best: "In short, the Springfield Plan's success will be measured not today, nor tomorrow, but in the future. It will be measured when today's children become citizens and community leaders in the brighter world of tomorrow."
John Lockwood, a freelance writer, lives in Washington, D.C.
His sources for this column include: The New York Times, Dec. 7, 1941; The Daily Boston Globe, Jan. 24, 1944; The Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1945; "The Story of the Springfield Plan," Clarence I. Chatto and Alice L. Halligan; The Chicago Defender, Dec. 18, 1943, March 31, 1945, May 5, 1945; Afro-American, May 25, 1946; "Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School," Michael C. Johanek and John L. Puckett.