“Carpeting the Sumner”: West Side and Central City Schools in Salt Lake City

• In Event: Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods and Applications in the 20th Century

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
Teachers at Sumner Elementary and nearby schools had immense needs “in the way of personnel, special programs, and environmental change.” However, in addition to rhetorically supporting hiring more staff, the president of the Salt Lake School Administrators Association proposed a creative solution: “Carpeting the Sumner would provide a much more effective learning environment to support the great effort the staff is making there.” This paper asks how administrators and community members responded to the needs in the west side and Central City schools in Salt Lake City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.


Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
This paper draws on García and Yosso’s theoretical and methodological model for writing critical histories of communities of color. Specifically I draw on oral histories, newspapers, and traditional archival sources to combat the erasure of communities of color in institutional archives and their guidance for how to use each type of source.


Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
I provide a historical analysis of the extent of racial segregation in Salt Lake City, as well as community demands for improving educational conditions for their students, and administrators’ responses. This includes looking at specific publicized incidents, such as parent protests about poor conditions at a local junior high, and more general trends in the neighborhoods.


Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
I analyze archival sources such as school board and Central City Community Center board meeting minutes, local activists’ personal papers, multiple oral history projects, and local reports/histories held at the Utah State Division of Archives and Records, University of Utah, and Utah Historical Society. I also draw on mainstream newspapers, namely the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, as well as the local and resistant paper, Wordpower.


Results:
The suggestion to carpet a struggling elementary school is illustrative of broader trends and tensions between local administrators and communities of color in Salt Lake City’s Central City and west side. Both parties recognized that west side and Central City schools were under-resourced and struggling and were servicing more students of color than the east side schools, but where administrators tried carpeting over structural issues, local communities of color pressed for more than cosmetic improvements.


Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
Building upon other scholars’ work on community and administrative tensions during desegregation, this paper draws these conversations to Utah, where despite documented segregation neither school segregation nor desegregation were legally mandated. Furthermore, it expands on other scholars’ work on whiteness and religion in Salt Lake City schools.

Author

• Callie Avondet, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign