ALAN writes:

This is the story of a dead school in a decadent city.

Grover Cleveland High School was opened in St. Louis in 1915 in a building as massive and impressive as a castle. It was designed by renowned architect William B. Ittner. Today it stands closed and abandoned, a victim of decades of neglect and suicidal public policies.

My boyhood best friend’s family lived in a house just across the street from Cleveland High School. In the summers of 1958-’63, he and I roamed at boyish whim throughout that neighborhood, walking through city parks and past barber shops, corner markets, bakeries, confectionaries, and shoe repair shops, visiting other classmates, trading baseball cards, playing baseball, buying candy or ice cream in the dime stores and drug stores, and listening to Bobby Vee, Connie Francis, Neil Sedaka, Shelley Fabares, and Bobby Vinton on our plastic, pocket-size transistor radios – all without a fear in the world. No one ever bothered us. It was a pleasant neighborhood in which to play, attend school, and be an altar boy at morning Mass and a patrol boy after classes. 

Four photographs taken circa 1916 show dozens of people assembled on a bright, sunny morning in front of a house one block from Cleveland High School. They are taking part in a Catholic parish’s annual Corpus Christi Procession. The women wear attractive hats and ankle-length dresses. The men wear suits and straw hats. Altar boys are kneeling on the lawn.  The pictures convey a degree of civility and restraint unequalled by anything seen in that neighborhood today. In their place: “Security” bars, doors with entry codes, schools that push “diversity,” and the noise of rap “music” on the streets.

The following incidents were perpetrated within a radius of five blocks from the Cleveland High School building between 1999 and 2011: — Young woman shot in head and back by 19-year-old male (“Quentin”) after she complained about his loud music. — Young woman (“Kanita”) stabs her boyfriend to death. — Another woman kills her boyfriend with butcher knife. — A Catholic church robbed twice; a bank robbed three times. — Police patrol car struck by four bullets. — Woman, 46, shot and killed in city park. — Man shoots at police officers. — Man shot to death in parking lot. — Black male, 17, robs and rapes woman. — Young woman shot to death by three young black males in (same) city park. — Man shot by two black males after letting them use his cell phone. — Police officers fire 5 shots at man (“Sirluv”, 21) who points gun at them. — And another man (“Jermaine”, 34) spends a few hours choking and raping his ex-girlfriend and smashing her TV and computer.

If I may borrow a line from Orwell: Such, such are the “joys of diversity.”

The high school closed in 1984 but the building was then used as a Junior Naval ROTC Academy. In 1989 my father took nine pictures of a new gymnasium being added on to the building. Seventeen years later, the building was closed – thereby proving the brilliant judgment of the School Board that authorized that construction.

Three years earlier, that School Board and its employees managed to spend $444,000 in one fiscal year for catered meals. In 2004, neglect or mismanagement enabled vandals to wreck three school buildings the School Board closed a year earlier. In 2005, “Rap Snacks” bags advertising “pimp education” could be found in public school cafeterias. Shouting matches were held at a School Board meeting in 2006. A few weeks ago two black males (20, 23) were charged with stealing computers, cash, and cell phones from the public school at which they were allowed to work as “security guards.”

Spending sprees, ghetto “culture,” incompetence, lowered hiring standards, and vicious assaults by juvenile thugs – these are some of the costs of “diversity”. (For more, see below.)

“Inside, it’s falling apart,” a St. Louis newspaper reported about Cleveland High School in 2006, as if that circumstance would not have developed had the building been properly maintained by competent people. A photograph showed cracked plaster and peeling paint on the wall of one classroom. Of course those things appeared there magically overnight, astonishing the fine people in administration and maintenance who could not possibly have foreseen them.

 When I attended classes at Cleveland High School in 1966 B.D. (Before Diversity), nearly all the students were white and the building’s interior was not “falling apart.” A photograph in the 1964 yearbook shows more than 200 students neatly attired on the stage in the auditorium; two are black, all the others white. A photo in the 1963 yearbook shows the Cleveland Concert Band in their attractive uniforms on the school’s athletic field. It consisted of 95 students – all white.

After the school was closed in 2006, a city resident wrote: “I know someone who taught there the past two years. It was horrible for her as a teacher. The students didn’t want to be in art class, didn’t listen, and didn’t know respect….”

Pause here to note that the school’s motto – formulated many years B.D. – had been: “Honesty, Industry, Loyalty, Courtesy.”

 A former city resident wrote in 2009: “I was a student at Cleveland during the late 1970s. I lived within a few blocks of the school. The building is, to me, the most beautiful school in St. Louis. So many of my friends’ parents and grandparents attended the school, and it’s a shame the neighborhood went down so bad. My brother and his wife lived there until last year, when the crime got too much for them. I remember sleeping with the front door wide open in the summer, no one bothered you….”

What these two commenters knew but chose not to say is that the disruptive students and the criminals were black. Telling the truth in plain words is something modern Americans are carefully taught – and agree – not to do.

Fifty years ago, gunshots could be heard in the Cleveland High School building – when the (white) boys’ and (white) girls’ rifle clubs practiced shooting at inanimate targets in the basement. Today, gunshots can be heard on the streets around that building – when (black) thugs shoot at animate targets.

Students in Cleveland’s rifle clubs could earn National Rifle Association medals and diplomas by perfecting their marksmanship in target shooting. A photo in the 1942 yearbook shows 44 girls (all white) in the “Sharpshooters” club. The 1964 yearbook shows 49 students (all white) in the rifle clubs. All the girls are wearing blouses and skirts. There are no T-shirts or blue jeans. It is a safe bet that “diversity and multiculti” agitators would express outrage at those things – at clubs that were all white; at the fact that white students used rifles responsibly, without shooting up the building or the neighborhood; at the fact that students who graduated from Cleveland in those years could read, write, speak, and think better than students in “diverse” and “multicultural” schools today; and at the fact that anyone dares point out these facts.

That school and the neighborhood around it were far safer and more civilized when they were run and occupied only by disciplined white men and their families than they became after court-mandated busing, integration, “fair housing,” and “affirmative action” policies were adopted. I know it because I attended that school, I lived there for decades, and I walked throughout that neighborhood a thousand times in daylight and at night – but never with the slightest concern for my security.

Observe the idiocy of this: A negligent or incompetent School Board permits an elegant school building to deteriorate in the same years when government mandates that such lowlifes be welcomed into the neighborhood. Could any greater farce be imagined? Are there better examples of people committing cultural suicide?

Cleveland High School was built when St. Louis had more than twice the population it has today and long before local control of schools was diluted by massive federal power. Local control is, of course, the only proper way to run schools and neighborhoods. There was a time when most Americans understood this and when teaching in all-black or predominantly-black schools was not made horrible by disruptive students. That time was before government-coerced integration and busing.

A black woman who taught in St. Louis public schools long ago said this: “St. Louis had one of the best school systems in the country. I don’t know why they decided that if they sent their children out to the county that they would get a better education and would have better teachers. We had them here. Until the bussing came. But now [1998] our schools have disintegrated to the point where we’re almost going to have to start from scratch.” (Teacher Anna Wigley, quoted by St. Louisan Ron Fagerstrom in his book Mill Creek Valley: A Soul of St. Louis [2000], p. 42)

This woman will never be featured in any article or TV “documentary” about “failing schools” because what she said does not support the revolutionary Marxist agenda for American families and children.

Shortly after Cleveland was closed, some neighborhood people and graduates formed an alliance to lobby for saving the building. They were sincere but they didn’t get anywhere. The School Board has not yet put the building up for sale or talked about demolition, but that is just a matter of time. Other school buildings have stood abandoned and for sale for years. To repair and reopen Cleveland High School is a pipe dream in a city now controlled by “diversity” zealots. (Since the year 2000, more than 28,000 people moved out of St. Louis, perhaps because they were tired of having “diversity” shoved down their throats in neighborhoods like this one.)

Spectacles like the abandoned Cleveland building – or a School Board infested with liars and opportunists (see Atlanta ) – are what you get when you bestow things, via “non-discrimination” laws, “affirmative action”, and “inclusion”, on people who have not earned them and will in fact drag them into the gutter. The one follows the other as surely as night follows day. In 1956, a Congressional committee looked into problems resulting from integration in schools. National Review magazine wrote: “Data on juvenile delinquency placed before the committee revealed a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism, and sex offenses in integrated schools. Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools… Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago.”  (National Review magazine, Oct. 6, 1956, p. 10)

In the past half century, most Americans have learned nothing about the evil of government coercion in neighborhoods and in schools, nor will they. The taxpayers of St. Louis once had good schools, competent teachers, local control, accountability, minimal deadwood, and high schools – both predominantly-white and predominantly-black – where dances were held as planned, not cancelled because those running them were too inept to know how to control disruptive students. They had all those things. Then they gave them away, in one act of ritual surrender after another.

In one of your essays, you wrote: “Modern mass schooling is one big confidence trick.” Truer words could not be written. But I would add this: Teachers’ unions, textbook publishers, bus companies, busybody bureaucrats, and “innovations-in-education” promoters are de facto mutual protection rackets. All of them depend on government power over American families and children. Without that power, how many of them could find honest work in an open marketplace?

The “conservative” president Ronald Reagan vowed to abolish the federal Department of Education. Did he do that? Are Americans naïve enough to imagine that the parasites firmly entrenched within the schooling racket would permit him or anyone else to do that? You can bet they would sooner permit him to get shot.

Who else but a nation of Eloi would continue to surrender their tax dollars to support such a coalition of racketeers?

Americans will never regain the power they surrendered to their federal government – in the belief that it would then seek to “improve education,” surely one of the greatest Fairy Tales of the twentieth century – except through another revolution.

The Amish and some homeschooling families have the right spirit when they say NO to the decadence inherent in government-run schools. This is the spirit of resistance to sheer, unmitigated Evil. May we wish earnestly that more American families will choose to follow their courageous example.

From the facade of Cleveland High School

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