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Herbert Max Abramson and Edgar E. Bailey grinned from yearbook photos, wearing ties and meticulously slicked-back hair. They listed their aspirations to be “A Harvard Man,” and to “Own a Railroad.” The school would host a number of dignitaries, including two U.S. presidents, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Amelia Earhart, and movie actress and World War II pinup Ann Sheridan. It would win scores of awards. Even as the concept of public high schools caught on in the 1930s and 1940s and enrollment became commonplace in America for both boys and girls, Northeast was still one of the most well-regarded high schools in the nation.

    Social change drastically affected Northeast and many urban high schools like it. The Northeast school was now required to serve all boys, rather than handpick the most talented. In the past, boys with limited ability went straight into the job market. Now they were going into the schools. Students ranged dramatically in ability and motivation. At the time, many thought this widening access to education was a horrible idea that would dilute the pool of the most talented. To handle the growing rolls, IQ tests were given, and boys were divided into low-IQ sections, called 9-A, and honors-type classes, in which they were pushed forward. Truancy accounted for 75 percent of the school’s troubles, and was attributed to the fact that boys who lacked interest in education, or were needed to work, were being forced into the schools, along with the sons and daughters of blacks who had migrated North from Alabama and the Carolinas.
    By 1950, it was readily apparent that Philadelphia’s heyday had come and was going. The Northeast alumni, a giant and tightly knit group of city businessmen with strong affection for their alma mater, felt their school, like most urban schools, was in decline. They began to meet, at first furtively, then publicly. Ironically, in 1951 the Northeast received the Francis Bellamy Award for school of the year. It would be the last year that the school received any national awards.
    In the fall of 1956, a rumor ran through the hallways of the Northeast: the school was moving. Northeast student Don Hackney, class of 1957, remembers a sinking feeling in his stomach as news bounced off the lockers. Principal Charles A. Young called all the boys to the auditorium.
    â€œWord was flying around that they were moving the school,” recalled Hackney almost forty years later. “We went to the auditorium, and the principal addressed us. We were respectful gentleman—the Men of the Northeast—so we wouldn’t have created any really volatile situation. We listened to the principal, but we were very upset. How could they do this? We didn’t want to move. They were going to take our trophies and all the things we’d worked so hard to win and put them in a new place?”
    It was true. The school’s powerful alumni had been meeting since 1952 to plan the school’s move. They had lobbied city officials and the board of education members, many of whom were Northeast alumni themselves. They gave two reasons for the move.
    First, they complained that the school at Eighth and Lehigh was old and deteriorating, and that a new building was needed. Second, they deemed the building overcrowded, with enrollment bursting and projected to increase. Students needed the space offered only in the suburbs, they said. They found a plot of land ten miles north. They used their powerful connections to make their voices heard.
    In truth, records show the school’s population was actually declining. What they didn’t mention in the public record was that the neighborhood was changing rapidly, and in the eyes of the Northeast alumni, for the worse. Old yearbooks show a steady increase in African American enrollment starting in the late 1940s. By the 1950s nearly half of the student body was black. They replaced students from white families who