In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant shutdowns that sent the city’s population into free fall. Youngstown could no longer fill its schools, so one would have to close.
But the city did not want to shut down Macklin’s school, Wilson High, which was mostly white. Officials wanted to close the nearby black school instead. Macklin, who is black, recently told me the city’s argument was, “ ‘Keep Wilson open—if you close it down, the white community will move. We’ll take our children and we’ll move.’ ” That argument won. The city shut down the black school, South High, in 1993, and its students were sent to the district’s remaining schools. White families continued to flee the south side anyway, and by 2016, students in the Youngstown School District were 15 percent white and 64 percent black...