Ensley High School

Ensley High School, located in the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama (United States), was founded in 1901 to serve the then-independent community of Ensley, which was centered on major plants operated by U.S. Steel and the American Cast Iron Pipe Company. It began with classes held at the Old Bush School before the last building, designed by architect David O. Whilldin, was constructed in 1908. In 2006, Ensley High School was merged into newly built Jackson-Olin High School.

Ensley High School was absorbed into the Birmingham City Schools when Ensley was annexed into the city in 1910. During its first decade, Ensley principal Roy Dimmitt compiled detailed statistical data on Ensley's male students in order to determine how much cigarette smoking affected their "efficacy". He found that the students who smoked were consistently outscored by their non-smoking counterparts. By his calculation almost two thirds of those who failed a year or withdrew from school were smokers. His findings were published in Henry Ford's 1914 anti-smoking volume "The Case Against the Little White Slaver."

In 1936 more than a hundred students at Ensley High School contracted food poisoning which was traced to profiteroles (cream puffs) purchased from a local bakery. The Jefferson County Department of Health, which had been unable to maintain their inspections program during the Depression, found conditions at the bakery to be "filthy". (Ford - 1914)

Previously an all-white school, Ensley High School was formally integrated, without major incident, in September 1964. Nevertheless, persistent racial segregation in the Birmingham area, especially after the loss of Ensley's major industries, made it so that the student body had become overwhelmingly African American by the mid-1970s. In recent decades the high school was repositioned as a "magnet school" within the Birmingham system.

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