The racial challenges confronting schools today deal with achievement gaps and socioeconomic balance, but there was a time when the issues were more basic.

Black versus white schools.

Though Illinois law prohibited school segregation, and some local schools were integrated, Champaign-Urbana, Danville and other communities also had all-black elementary schools in the years surrounding the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.

In north Champaign, it was Willard School and Lawhead (later Booker T. Washington) School. In Danville, it was Jackson School.

Lawhead, a four-room school at 412 E. Grove St., C, had been integrated in earlier decades, when the north part of Champaign still had German and Italian immigrants, according to News-Gazette archives and longtime Champaign residents.

But by the late 1940s, only five of the 17 elementary schools in Champaign-Urbana were integrated. Lawhead and Willard were 100 percent black, while white children who lived within those attendance zones were sent to nearby Columbia School, which was all-white.

The Champaign County League of Women Voters assessed racial conditions in Champaign-Urbana in 1948 and 1968, and in both cases the schools were found lacking.

Not only were the races kept separate in some schools, but the education was unequal. The league's report singled out Willard School, at Fifth and Church streets, for its "bad physical facilities."

Classrooms were small, even though Willard had the largest class sizes in the district – 37 in the third-grade class, compared with 21 in the racially divided third-grade class at Marquette School and 14 at the all-white Gregory School.

The halls served as recreation space on rainy days, and the school had no office for the principal and no restroom for the teachers, the report said. Playground space was so cramped "that the children spill over into the street during recess periods." And to reach the school, many children had to cross railroad tracks at a point where there was no signal or crossing guard.

None of Urbana's elementary schools was racially integrated except the Hays School (now King School), which was relatively equally divided between white and black.

Lawhead was replaced in 1952 by the larger Booker T. Washington, 606 E. Grove St., built down the street. After a lengthy court fight with the building's owner, the city of Champaign tore down the old Lawhead School in 1990. Willard School closed in 1963 because of declining enrollment.

Washington remained a black school, with an African-American principal and teachers. But in 1968 it became a focus of Champaign's desegregation efforts and was turned into a magnet school for the arts, to entice white families to send their children to school in north Champaign. Black students were bused to schools across the district.

The magnet program was later dropped when Champaign moved to a schools of choice system, but Washington is now being rebuilt and converted back into a magnet school focusing on science, engineering, technology and math.

In 1966, Urbana became the first district in the state to institute a desegregation program, and by 1968 the elementary schools were well-integrated. But desegregation came at the expense of black children from the north side who had gone to Hays School (by then mostly black) and were being reassigned to the district's primarily all-white elementary schools. The white students bused to Hays School came from families of University of Illinois students living at Orchard Downs.

Danville's history is a mixed bag, according to Superintendent Mark Denman.

Garfield School, 1101 N. Gilbert St., was always a neighborhood school and integrated from the start, he said.

Jackson School, 516 N. Jackson St., which dated back to at least the early 1900s, was integrated at one time but by midcentury had become an all-black school.

White families who lived right next door would go to another school instead, Denman said.

Collett School was also predominantly black, but white children from the neighborhood attended there, Denman said.

It closed in the mid-1970s, and the site is now home to a Head Start center.

In the early 1960s the NAACP, ministers and other activists were pushing for change, as Jackson School's poor reputation had cost it the support of African-American families, too. The school board voted to convert the school into district offices and reassign its students to other schools.

In the early 1970s, the district tried to further racially balance schools by stipulating that each school's minority enrollment be within 15 percentage points of the district's average.

Former Danville Superintendent David Fields epitomized the scope of change in the last half of the century.

Fields, who retired in 2001, grew up in Danville and attended Jackson School when it was still segregated.

He wasn't allowed to swim in the pool when he attended Danville High School.

He later spent 41 years as a Danville teacher, principal and administrator, and when Jackson School was converted to district offices, Fields' office was back in his old first-grade classroom.

Likewise, former Washington Principal Hester Suggs, 82, a Champaign native, has seen the racial climate change markedly over the decades.

The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on her family's lawn several times when she was a child.

After she had children of her own, white neighbors in southwest Cham-paign told their kids to stay away from Suggs' children.

After she began teaching, parents gaped when they walked into her classroom for the first time, shocked to find a black teacher.

Once, she said, she received an anonymous letter at Leal School saying something like, "Get out of town or else."

Years later, a student tracked her down to apologize, saying she'd felt bad about it for years.

"I've seen a lot of progress," Suggs said recently.

Educators and parents, black and white alike, still debate the accomplishments of desegregation, many arguing that the issue is less about where children attend school than the quality of the curriculum, school resources, and poverty.

"Desegregation is a difficult thing," said Janet Alexander, a former Danville teacher and principal who lived through desegregation as a child.

Her father, the late Samuel Graham, was Danville's first black principal, at Jackson School.

"It has its pros and cons," Alexander said. "Certainly, you want all people to live together and relate to each other. The only place some children see people of a different ethnicity is at school."

On the other hand, some children do better in classrooms surrounded by people who are just like them, with strong teacher role models who see their potential, she said.

Crystal Womble, who attended Washington before it was integrated, said in a 2004 documentary produced by Franklin Middle School students:

"The teachers knew you as well as knowing your family. ... For me it seemed like there was a belief in the fact that you could learn, no matter who you were or what your background ... and then the fact also that there was a lot of follow-up between the teachers and the parents."