Shortridge High School (Indianapolis, Indiana)
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Shortridge High School
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Shortridge High School, 2016
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| Location | 3401 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
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| Coordinates | 39°49′8″N 86°9′19″W / 39.81889°N 86.15528°WCoordinates: 39°49′8″N 86°9′19″W / 39.81889°N 86.15528°W |
| Area | 10.9 acres (4.4 ha) |
| Built | 1927 |
| Architect | Kopf & Deery |
| Architectural style | Classical Revival |
| Part of | Shortridge-Meridian Street Apartments Historic District (#00000195) |
| NRHP Reference # | 83000078 |
| Added to NRHP | September 15, 1983 |
Shortridge High School is a public high school located in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. It opened in 1864 as the Indianapolis High School and is the oldest free, public high school in the state of Indiana. It is the home of the International Baccalaureate program of the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS).
Shortridge High School was established as the Indianapolis High School in 1864 as the state’s first free high school. Abraham C. Shortridge was recruited to become school superintendent in 1863. Shortridge was a strict educator when it came to drilling students and faculty alike. However, he was also innovative in many ways, including the hiring of female teachers and the admission of African-American students. By 1878, Shortridge High School served 502 students.Roda Selleck, who began teaching art at the school in the 1880s, soon won acclaim for introducing "craftwork" – leather, pottery, jewelry, and metalwork – to the curriculum, and later developed a line of pottery, "Selridge Pottery", designed by students. She remained at the school until her death in 1924.
The school was a lightning rod for civil rights almost from the beginning. At its inception the students were primarily white. In 1903, in a football game with Wabash College, Wabash coach Tug Wilson substituted an African-American left tackle by the name of Samuel Gordon. The Shortridge team captain led his team off the field after a scene. Gordon kept his sense of humor, noting he was sorry the game was called on account of darkness.
While minority students had attended Shortridge from the very beginning, the majority of the students were white until 1927. In 1927, the city's first and only purposely-segregated all-black school, Crispus Attucks High School, was opened on the near westside. Designed to house all of the city's black students, regardless of residential location, its creation was due in large part to the influence of a branch of the Ku Klux Klan led by D.C. Stephenson, on the city's school board. While the city's elementary schools had largely been segregated by social custom, the construction of Crispus Attucks High School as an exclusively African-American school created segregation by rule. Although Crispus Attucks was intended to educate all black high school students, those who lived in an area where they could attend either Crispus Attucks High School or Shortridge High School were allowed to choose which school they wanted to attend. Many of these students chose to attend Shortridge High School.
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