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were moving to the suburbs.
    Records show the plan for a new building was hatched officially on March 11, 1953, when Frederick C. Fiechter, president of the Northeast Alumni Association, submitted a proposal to the school board. In May 1953, the new site was purchased for $500,000. One year later, the school board authorized $6 million for the new forty-three-acre Northeast school. At the time, $6 million was considered an extravagant amount of money for a new building. Construction began at Cottman and Algon.
    The alumni had cited the school’s deteriorating condition in arguing for a new building. However, after the alumni secured the new building, the city voted to keep the old Northeast School open anyway. The school left behind would not close; it would be renamed Thomas Edison High School, and it would serve the mostly black neighborhood. It was a fifty-year-old structure in desperate need of repair, but almost all the money would go to the new school.
    William H. Loesche, chair of the school board’s business committee, was a lone voice at a 1954 school board meeting when he called the new building a “luxury.” “We should possibly be spending this money on replacing and repairing some of our older buildings in the city,” Loesche noted in the Bulletin . The article went on to say: “But other members overrode his objections.”
    The physical moving of a school is, in fact, not that unusual. Northeast traces its history back to a Girard Street location, in the 1880s, when it was an annex to Central High School, a school that had also moved several times as late as 1938. However, when a school moves, it usually brings its students with it. Under school district policy, students from the Eighth and Lehigh neighborhood were too far away to be allowed to attend the new Northeast building. The new school was sectioned off for its new neighbors—white residents who had fled the inner city for the suburbs.
    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