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Girard College is an independent college preparatory five-day boarding school located on a 43-acre campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school was founded and permanently endowed from the shipping and banking fortune of Stephen Girard upon his death in 1831. ()
With the assistance of noted attorney William J. Duane (1780–1865), in the 1820s, he wrote a long will and testament, outlining every detail of how his fortune would be used. Immediately after he died in 1831, the provisions of his will were made public. In addition to extensive personal and institutional bequests, he left the bulk of his fortune to the city of Philadelphia to build and operate a residential school. The bequest was the largest single act of philanthropy up to that time in American history.
The Girard Estate remains open in perpetuity. Its endowment and financial resources are held in trust by the courts of the Pennsylvania, which provides much of the school's operating budget.
The buildings and classrooms for Girard took some time to design and construct with their expensive "Greek Revival" stone architecture, with monolithic columns, but were ready and opened on January 1, 1848, under provisions of Girard's will supervised by the appointed trustees, including banker and financier Nicholas Biddle, (1786–1844).
Girard's vision for the school can best be understood in the context of early 19th-century Philadelphia. The city was then at the forefront of creating innovative American institutions designed to solve a specific social challenge, such as the newly founded and constructed Eastern State Penitentiary (humane incarceration), the Pennsylvania Hospital (mental illness), the Pennsylvania Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (disabilities), and the Franklin Institute (scientific knowledge). Girard chose to dedicate his immense fortune to helping educate young men of Philadelphia as Americans for the future.
Girard's will stipulated that students at Girard College must be "poor, white, male, orphans". For over a century, the school remained exclusive to orphaned Caucasian race boys. However, in 1831, a mother who became a widow had no rights and resources, and "guardians" were often appointed by the Probate court of the city and state. Girard operated as a school for fatherless boys rather than children with no living parents or guardians. (In the 19th century, the college determined the legal definition of the term orphan to be "a fatherless child".)
From May 1954, with the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, there was increasing pressure on Girard College to accept racial integration, as the city's State school had long been. After an extended, bitter, 14-year civil-rights struggle led by Cecil B. Mooreincluding Martin Luther King Jr.'s August 1965 address to a crowd outside Girard's front gates (" Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, that has ... a kind of Berlin Wall to keep the colored children of God out") the first four black boys entered the school in September 1968.
Not part of the School District of Philadelphia, which had long been racially integrated (as being in a northern, formerly "free state"), Girard College was still considered "private" even though it had a very public educational mission and was racially segregated long before the consideration of the "Brown v. Board of Education" legal case. Girard College was ordered to desegregate by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 unanimous decision. Perhaps the key to the ruling was that Girard, following its Stephen Girard, was administered by the "Board of Directors of City Trusts", and that public institution could not continue to maintain the historically outdated entrance requirement.
For fourteen years, the legal battle to desegregate Girard College continued. Beginning on May 1, Cecil B. Moore and the Philadelphia Freedom Fighters marched around the wall encompassing the campus for seven months in 1965. The initial pickets were met with strong resistance, directed by police chief Frank Rizzo. On the first day, 1,000 police officers lined the walls of the college. The police used repressive tactics toward the protests including motorcycle and foot charges into the crowds and arrests, beginning on May 5. Stanley Branche and seven other members of the Black Coalition Movement were arrested when they attempted to scale the walls. A highlight of these protests came on August 2 of that year when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to the front gates of Girard's campus and addressed the protesters.
The first four African-American male students were finally admitted on September 11, 1968.
Sixteen years later, the policy of an all-male student body was also changed, and the first girls were admitted in 1984. The first female student was admitted as a first grader in 1984, following more adjustments to the admission criteria so that the death of a father was no longer required. Girls were gradually integrated into the college over a 12-year enrollment period, with subsequent new female students only permitted to enroll in the same graduating class as the first female student or a younger class. The first young women graduated with a Girard diploma in 1993. The graduating class of 1996 was the first class to graduate with more female students than males, although it remains more or less balanced yearly. Current enrollment of Girard College in the 21st century is about evenly divided between boys and girls and about 90% African-American.
In May 2009 Girard College named Autumn Adkins as its 16th president, the first female chief administrator in its (then) 160-year existence. Adkins, now Autumn Adkins Graves, was not only the first woman but also the first African-American to head the college. Adkins resigned in 2012.
Following Adkins, Clarence D. Armbrister was the first African-American man to serve in this role. He was succeeded in 2018 by David P. Hardy.
Entering 2016, enrollment at Girard was projected to be 311; of these, 122 were Elementary School students (grades 1 to 5), 89 were Middle Schoolers, and 100 attended High School (grades 9 to 12). Girard employs 127 faculty members, of whom 71 are academic teachers and 56 are residential advisers. Class sizes range between 12 and 20 students in the elementary school and 16-22 students in the middle school. In the high school, honors classes have 15 students, and other classes 20 to 25 students.
Girard's will demanded an architectural competition for the school's design. Endowed with his $2-million contribution, the 1832 competition was the first American architectural competition to participate nationally.Bruce Laverty, Michael J. Lewis, and Michelle Taillon Taylor, Monument to Philanthropy: The Design and Building of Girard College, 1832-1848 (Philadelphia: Girard College, 1998) The winning architect was Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887). After the Girard commission, Walter designed the dome of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. He returned to Philadelphia and became an assistant architect on the City Hall and, in 1857, a founding member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
Founder's Hall was the school's original classroom building. It has three main floors, each measuring . The plan for each floor, according to Stephen Girard's specifications, consists of a front hall, four 50 ft. square rooms with 25 ft. ceilings arranged two-by-two, and a back hall the same size as the front hall. The scale of the spaces was impressively large when the building first opened.
Resulting from his association with architect Walter, Nicholas Biddle hired him in 1834 to convert the Biddle country seat, Andalusia, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from a large Pennsylvania farmhouse into an exemplary domestic Greek-Revival structure.
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