A segregated graduation ceremony was held at a prestigious school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Washington, DC, to honor 24 Black deaf students and four Black instructors who were forced to attend segregated schools.
Saturday, Gallaudet institution honored students who attended the Kendall School Division II for Blacks on the Gallaudet campus in the early 1950s, according to a news release from the institution.
In addition to designating July 22 as “Kendall 24 Day,” the institution issued a Board of Trustees proclamation acknowledging and professing regret for continuing the students’ longstanding injustice.
The proclamation, which apologizes to all 24 students by name, states that Gallaudet deeply regrets its role in perpetuating the historic inequity, systematic marginalization, and grave injustice committed against the Black Deaf community when Black Deaf students were excluded from Kendall School and in denying 24 Black Deaf Kendall School students their diplomas.
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The Fight for Black Deaf Children’s Rights
Beginning in 1898, Black students were accepted and educated at the Kendall School at Gallaudet University.
However, after White parents objected to the integration of races in 1905, Black deaf students were transferred to the Maryland School for the Colored Blind and Deaf-Mutes in Baltimore or the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, according to the university. As a consequence, no longer were Black students present at Kendall School.
According to the university, Louise B. Miller, a hearing mother of four children, three of whom were deaf, initiated a legal dispute in 1952 after her oldest son, Kenneth, was turned away from the school because he was Black.
Miller and the parents of four other deaf Black children, including her son Kenneth, filed and won a civil complaint against the District of Columbia Board of Education for the right of deaf Black children to attend Kendall School.
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Source: www.cbsnews.com