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• 1 2016-03-09T19:41:56-08:00 Fairfax High School 13 plain 2016-07-21T17:27:16-07:00 34.081959°, -118.360127°
  Fairfax High School experienced a drastic demographic transformation during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While estimates suggest that about 90% of Fairfax High was white and Jewish during the mid-1960s, by 1973 about 26% of the student body was African-American. Two events in particular helped initiate these demographic changes. First, in 1968 the Los Angeles Board of Education slightly redrew Fairfax's zoning boundaries to include the heavily African-American area South of Pico Boulevard. Furthermore, the San Fernando Earthquake of 1971 destroyed much of the predominantly African-American Los Angeles High School. In response to the earthquake, the board instituted double sessions at Fairfax High School. While Los Angeles High School reopened after a semester, some of the transferees continued to stay at Fairfax. “The change,” as the Los Angeles Times noted, “is best illustrated perhaps by a cartoon hanging on the office wall of principal William S. Layne, showing students’ heads—some with yarmulkes, others with Afros."
   
  Communal responses to these shifts varied. Students tended to embrace the changing demographics of Fairfax High School. As Fairfax High senior Clifford Schireson explained in the Los Angeles Times following the 1971 earthquake,“The students, faculty and administration of both schools are reaping great benefits from the situation. I am proud to say that my school has enough heart and understanding to help Los Angeles High School.” Jewish parents, however, vocally opposed the board’s decisions. Indeed, the Board of Education received dozens of letters from parents who feared that integration and double-sessions would provoke tensions between blacks and Jews and would lead to a decline in the quality of education for all the students involved. 
   
  
  What followed was a paradox of sorts: while Farifax High's white Jewish population gradually dwindled throughout the course of the 1970s, Fairfax High became one of the only schools in Los Angeles to achieve an integrated racial balance without busing and received funds from the district to develop a multicultural education program.