Credit: Courtesy of Millersville University, Helen A. Ganser Library, Archives and Special Collections
In the late 1800s most African-American children in Philadelphia went to largely white schools. Central, the city's most prestigious public school, graduated its first black students, John Henry Harris and William Herbert Jones, in 1888. Central's black alumni include Alain Locke, Class of 1902, who after graduating from Harvard University in 1907, became the nation's African American Rhodes Scholar. Central taught boys only until a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge in 1983 ruled that its single-sex admissions policy was unconstitutional. By 1990, 50 percent of its student body was female.
