Anacostia's Ketcham School across Good Hope Road opened in 1908 to serve white elementary school children. For junior and senior high school, white students crossed the river until 1935, when Anacostia Junior-Senior High School opened at 16th and R Streets. In 1943 Kramer Junior High opened next door for grades seven through nine. African American children had to cross the river for junior high school until 1950, when Douglass Junior High opened in the old Birney School, and their older siblings continued the commute for another four years until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. Under DC's 1954 desegregation plan, students could remain in their current school until graduation or switch immediately to their neighborhood school. That first September, only 44 of Anacostia High School's approximately 1,200 students were African American. School opened calmly, but in early October white students at Anacostia, Eastern, and McKinley High Schools staged a strike to protest desegregation; elsewhere students quickly returned to class, but at Anacostia police had to step in to end the protest. Washington's German Orphan Home also once stood about six blocks up Good Hope Road. Founded in 1879 by the Concordia German Evangelic Lutheran Church in Foggy Bottom, it moved to Good Hope Hill Farm, purchased from Captain Samuel and Flora Cabell in 1880, then moved to Upper Marlboro, Md., in 1965 before closing in 1978.
