Education: Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City

When neighborhoods go down, even the best schools usually follow. Such might have been the future for Kansas City's venerable Central High School. Founded in 1887, it was long the city's top all-white school, usually sent half its graduates to college, boasted among its alumni Actor William Powell, Singer Gladys Swarthout, and even baseball's redoubtable Casey Stengel. But after World War II, Central's once prosperous white neighborhood rapidly turned black. When Central integrated in 1955, racial tension reached such a pitch that police cars haunted the premises. One sergeant predicted "a lot worse situation here than they had in Little Rock."

The...

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