[1] Most Baltimore City public schools were not integrated until after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
[citation needed] However, in 1952, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute was forced to open its advanced college preparatory curriculum to African American students.
The institute's "A" course included calculus, analytical chemistry, electricity, mechanics and surveying; subjects not offered at the black schools in the City at that time.
Consequently, a group of 16 African American students, along with help and support from their parents, the Baltimore Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), applied for the engineering "A" course at the institute.
The hearing on the "Douglass" plan lasted for hours with WILMER DEHUFF PRINCIPAL OF BALTIMORE POLY and others arguing that separate but equal "A" courses would satisfy constitutional requirements, and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall arguing that the plan was a gamble and a cost the city should not take.
[4] The vote vindicated the NAACP national strategy of raising the cost of 'separate but equal' schools beyond what taxpayers were willing to pay.
By 1968, the tensions between the African American and white citizens in Baltimore were high, and came to a head when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.