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One exception was made. Grandchildren of Northeast alumni still living near Eighth and Lehigh would be allowed to move to the new location. This clause allowed almost all white students still attending the Eighth and Lehigh school to transfer.

Once again, the Northeast would be at the forefront of an educational trend. In 1954, the Supreme Court's
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision had officially forbidden school segregation. However, in Northeast's case, no one was technically forbidding black students from attending. The alumni just created all the right geographic circumstances for it to be practically impossible. Hence, they would be the leaders of de facto segregation, a movement that spread quickly throughout the city high schools and is, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the reason schools are more segregated than ever before.

At the time of Northeast's move, its student population was 50 percent Caucasian and 50 percent African American. By 1958, in the span of about two years, the old Northeast—Edison High School—became almost entirely African American. The new Northeast was 100 percent Caucasian. It would stay that way for the next thirty years.

The board also approved the transfer of the “name, traditions, and specialized courses of the school” to the new location. The best teachers left, too. According to a December 1956
Sunday Bulletin
article, the school took the principal, five department heads, and the athletic director.

This “created some resentment in the community and among some of the veteran members of the faculty, the greatest number of which will stay at Eighth and Lehigh,” according to a minor mention made in a November 1956
Bulletin
piece. If there was an outcry within the community, it was either not strong enough to even receive much press, or was ignored.

The new school principal tried, however unconvincingly, to smooth over the frustrations of the students left behind. “There was some justice to the resentment of the loss of their school name and traditions, but the boys have now come to see that there is also a privilege in helping build traditions for a new school, and, in a sense, being a pioneer class,” Dr. Robert Wayne Clark, Edison's new principal, said at the time. Shortly thereafter, he transferred out himself.

A placard with the school's new name went up. On the first day, in September 1957, senior Ron Ford, who is black, walked down the once familiar halls. The trophy case was gone. So were the stained-glass windows and the plaque dedicated to the three hundred Northeast graduates who'd given their lives to World War II. He peeked his head into his old classrooms. His favorite math teacher, the one who was tough but fair, had left for the new Northeast. His coach, the main reason Ford had aspired to Northeast, had left, too, and he'd taken the team's red-and-white uniforms with him. That year they lost the basketball championship to Overbrook High and its rising star Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain.

“I was distraught,” said Ford. “If you could wear the red and black of the Northeast, you were looked up to. It was a source of pride and wanting to belong, and that was taken away and given to someone else. The goose bumps you got from the football and basketball games were not there. We had packed houses every game. Girls from Kensington came. All that changed. They took that away. The building may be the same, but it's not just a building that made the Northeast.”

Meanwhile, ten miles north, little had been spared in the construction of the new Northeast school. Of the $6 million budgeted for a new school, $1 million had been spent on athletics, including three grandstands seating 6,700; fields for football, baseball, hockey, and soccer; four tennis courts; a quartermile track; and three parking areas. Several uproars made it into the local press, but none of them had anything to do with the inequality between the schools. One was over the fact that girls were being granted access to the great Northeast! Another had to do with changing a line in the school song from “the walls made of granite” to “the strong and sturdy walls.” And the alumni were in a state over sports teams changing names from the Archives to the Vikings.

The new Northeast opened to students in February 1957 and dedication day, a few months later, brought a huge celebration and decades of alumni with it. There were open-house tours, a laying of the cornerstone, an alumni dinner, and speakers, including the board of education president. There was an alumni banquet. President Dwight Eisenhower was invited, but declined at the last minute. A plaque in his name was dedicated to the Northeast that said, “For nearly 70 years this school has played an essential part in the training of young citizens. The completion of the modern building indicates your determination that the school shall increase its splendid contribution to your community and nation in the years ahead, April 27th 1957.”

Back in Philadelphia, businesses that once demanded that schools train boys had disappeared. In the half-century after 1925, the city lost two-thirds of its industrial jobs and virtually all its great firms. Of the twenty-five large companies operating in Philadelphia in 1925, only one remains a major player.

The textile industry's flight to the suburbs dealt the hardest blow to the North Philadelphia neighborhoods surrounding Eighth and Lehigh. In 1928, 350 of the city's 850 textile firms operated in North Philadelphia, employing almost 35,000 workers. Of these businesses, 265 remained by 1940 and only seventy by the 1960s. Hardwick and Magee, across the street from Northeast, didn't survive much past the 1950s. The Stetson Hat Company, famous for its millions of Western hats, closed its doors in the 1960s, as did the Quaker Lace Company down Lehigh Avenue on Fourth street, set back by the invention of knitting machines capable of making lace. Across North Philadelphia, hundreds of formerly proud giant factories were continually downsized until they were nothing but rotting hulks of brick, mangled wire, and chemicals.

It was the early 1960s, and the future was dim for students at Edison High. The school board announced that a new citywide program intended for “slow learners” would be installed at Edison. The board warned principals not to use the program as a dumping ground for students with discipline problems, but that seemed inevitable. The historic U.S. Supreme Court
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision to end segregation in 1954 had created the opposite effect: Edison's student body was almost 100 percent black. The Supreme Court decision only hastened white flight across the city. In the 1950s, the student population of Philadelphia's Simon Gratz High School was divided evenly between whites and blacks. Ten years later it was 100 percent black. In Philadelphia, 1961 marked the last year in which there were equal numbers of whites and blacks in the city schools. After that, the population would become two-thirds black and continue to segregate. By 1971, the number of the city's Puerto Rican students, concentrated in North Philadelphia, had grown to 3 percent of the school population. Edison was the school primarily serving them.

As civil rights protests arose in the 1960s and 1970s, minority parents began to echo the same complaints about Edison's deteriorating condition that their white predecessors had made prior to the 1957 move. That move had faced little protest by black parents then, but times were changing, and white flight was now held up by neighborhood activists as blatant racism. Resentment over the state of the old school building—which was dilapidated and infested with rats—boiled over.

In October 1968, a student walkout to protest the conditions spread violence throughout the city. The students at Edison High School were active participants. An article in the
Bulletin
read, in part:

The Vietnam War dealt another blow to the school. Hundreds of Edison boys volunteered or were drafted. By war's end, the principal tallied the deaths and was astonished to see that sixty-six Edison students had given their lives in the war. When Northeast students died in World War II, an enormous plaque was mounted in the auditorium listing their names. Edison's fallen heroes didn't receive any recognition. Their “ultimate sacrifice” would go largely unnoticed by anyone outside of Edison.

By the 1970s, parents had organized and were campaigning for a new building. The seventy-year-old high school was by far the city's oldest. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceilings. Paint peeled. Heating systems broke down. When sections of the school became too dangerous to occupy, the city had the custodian board them up. Soon, nearly half of the school was sealed off and boarded up. Graffiti marked the transoms and white moldings. Bars went up across the windows.

In 1972, after a long neighborhood campaign, activists came within just a few votes of winning city funding for a new school building. They'd secured a site one mile north, at Second and Luzerne. It was across the street from a graveyard, in a neighborhood that happened to be largely white. The local residents vociferously opposed moving Edison into their backyard. At the eleventh hour, Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist, bat-wielding former police commissioner, blocked the plan. Years of work were defeated.

Test scores at other high schools—Overbrook, Simon Gratz, and Ben Franklin—were falling, but Edison fell the furthest. When students took the California Achievement Tests in 1976, a whopping 80 percent of Edison students scored in the bottom percentile nationwide, indicating that they were “functionally illiterate,” according to
The Philadelphia Inquirer
.

In 1979, seniors from Edison and neighboring schools tried again. They boycotted classes. They marched on the board of education, complaining they were getting a “rotten education.” They said instruction was inadequate, and that they wouldn't return to class until the situation had improved. Their pleas were largely ignored.

By the 1980s, Edison was widely regarded as the city's worst school. A September 1982 article in the
Inquirer
summed it up: “The way most people think of Edison, if they think of it at all, is as just another ghetto school with a legacy of racial problems and gang infestation.”

The North Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding the school had continued to evolve and change. A wave of Puerto Rican immigration swept through North Philadelphia in the early 1980s, and the new arrivals eventually became organized and politically vocal. The neighborhood elected a Latino city councilor, Angel Ortiz. Philadelphia also had its first black mayor, Wilson Goode. The city's population was still declining, and blacks were now in the majority. Those community groups involved in the nearly thirty-year battle for a new school building to replace the deteriorating one finally had representation in government. The dream was gaining strength.

In 1988, a sprawling new school building opened at Second and Luzerne, the same site it had requested fifteen years earlier (the majority of the white neighbors who'd once opposed the plan had since moved to the suburbs). The new school, with grassy lawns, a pond, and a parking lot, cost upward of $50 million. At the time, it was the city's most expensive school. It was to be bilingual, an educational idea that had become trendy in recent years.