Chicago Reader
On June 15, 1863—exactly 150 years ago this coming Saturday—a "Colored School" opened in Chicago. The city's black residents hadn't asked for it.
Six months earlier, a state representative from Chicago named Melville Fuller had proposed that Chicago be required to provide a separate school for Negro and mulatto children, and prohibited from allowing "colored" children to attend schools with whites. The bill soon passed and was signed into law, the City Council and the Board of Education quickly complied, and the Colored School opened in a building rented from a church. The Chicago Times exulted that the city's white children would henceforth be spared "the degrading necessity of associating with the negro."