- [Presenter] Major funding for this program was provided by.

(many people speaking at the same time) (upbeat music) (music continues) - When I first got in Central, I had no idea about the history of women in Central and it was just last year that I found out, you know, about how they started integrating women at Central and how it was an all boys school before.

(jazzy trumpet playing) - We went to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown before the first day of school and met with the lawyers who had represented my friends in the lawsuit and sort of discussed what was going to happen that first day of school, I mean we were escorted on that pathway into the school with just boys standing on either side of the pathway, just watching us walk through, and the press was there.

(students chatting) - Central was created to be a college prep school.

That's how it started off.

So I know going to a new school for those women, it would be very different, a very different environment, it's kind of like they're going into a men's world and it's not their world.

So I would ask them questions about like how they dealt with that, how they advocated for themselves and made changes because for me it feels very natural to go to a school like this.

I feel like I'm not in somebody, I don't have imposter syndrome.

I'm going to an academically advanced school.

- There were just a lot more academic opportunities at Central, particularly in the math and computer and science area.

So that was very appealing to me.

Like I said, I never took computers until I was a senior, whereas other people were taking it from the ninth grade and I didn't like the idea that this public institution that was funded by our tax dollars was not open to me simply because I was a girl, that was the only reason and that certainly didn't seem fair.

- I remember, you know, having the discussion with my brother, with my mom, and my brother telling me that, you know, he had some friends that he graduated with who was like, oh you know, these girls trying to get in Central, it's not right, you know, just kind of wanting to hold onto that history and it was great to have my big brother who's always been, you know, looking out for me who was like, absolutely not.

- Well you got Central, you got Girl's High, they're separate but equal school, separate but equal?

Why not just go to the place that's best for you?

Let's put the litmus on who are we putting in there?

Like are they able to carry on those traditions?

Can they achieve when they're there?

That's where the folks should be.

- I don't know that I knew that much about the history, you know, of the girls.

I mean I do know that they weren't very wanted and I didn't feel that by the time I was there, except that I think one thing we talked about is, I mean it was still a building that had been made for boys.

So at the time when I got there they had like, you know, repurposed some of the male boy bathrooms for us, but they still had urinals in them.

- As girls, our place was that bathroom and that was our clubhouse where we went to meet, talk, rest, smoke.

- It never entered my mind that I wasn't equal to a male and that I shouldn't be in the same school as a boy and that I couldn't compete at the same level as a boy.

- I didn't realize how recent it was to my time of starting of when women began there.

I certainly came into to Central knowing that, hey I'm just as good as any of the males that are in my class.

There were plenty of demonstrations of awesome other females.

It was just all of us feeling the challenge of, okay, how can I show that I'm better than perhaps they think I am?

- Knowing the experience that my brother had, because he was a senior at Central when I was a freshman at Saul, that I knew that I wanted to be a part of that.

I wanted to have that experience, and I wanted to make sure that other girls would have that experience.

- I don't think Central's like a perfect school, but it's one of the best schools that I've been to.

The environment is probably the healthiest one that I've ever been in at a school, and it seems like we're taking steps in the right direction with a new president.

- When the news came across I was like, you know, it was a double take, you know, Black woman taking the reins of an institution like Central.

- Whenever you're the first, you carry a lot with you.

You have a lot of people looking to you, whether it is consciously looking to you, or sort of secretly looking to you to see what example are you setting, how are you leading, how will you respond to adversity.

- I think like with us having that new female president, I think that more change will come possibly 'cause we've only ever had male presidents, so I think like maybe possibly even after we leave, that Central will change in that way.

- I think it's a unique thing to our school, especially in such like a academically segregated city, and I like last year we had a lot of showcases, you know, I got to see so many different cultures, and learn so much about so many other people.

- What was so beautiful about Central is, like we talked about, 30 30, 30, right?

Women and men being equal, you know, supporting each other in these ventures.

- Having more students here, not even just female students but students of of all genders that are not just men is important because it opens our world a little bit more.

It kind of makes us able to see other parts of the universe that we haven't seen before.

- The admission of young women at Central High School saved this school as we know it.

Central High School would not have survived as a academic selective admission high school without the young women being admitted.

There weren't enough students here and we believe that the school district would have converted this into a neighborhood high school.

These young ladies immediately got involved in some of the extracurricular activities, and wrote for the school newspaper, The Centralizer, wrote for the literary magazine, became involved in the music department programs.

- A couple, much of my girlfriends all ended up being cheerleaders and it's funny, there was one requirement I remember, to be a cheerleader you had to be able to do a split.

I could never do a split in my life.

So I never tried out for it, so I never joined the cheerleading team.

I did pep squad and then you know, helped start the first girls track and field.

(cheerleaders shouting) - I've actually heard from many alumni that the addition of female students is part of the reason that Central is such an incredible institution that it is today.

It may not have remained to be otherwise.

In a lot of ways it's difficult to envision what our halls looked like without girls and women there.

And not only female students, but female members of the faculty.

Right, there was a lot of time when there were not female teachers at Central High School.

So I can only imagine that the experience was vastly different.

(marching band playing) (band continues playing) - When I think about my connection to Central, what comes to mind is that all my siblings went there and it was pretty much the school that I was predestined to go to.

I wanted to go to Bodine actually, and they had a great language program and because my brother was a star track athlete, my sister actually was the first class of women to go to Central.

I went to Central.

My sister Nina Che is the woman that raised me.

My mother went back to work when I was very young, and I was four years old when she started Central.

- Alani Taylor, I am a biologist for the Army Corps of Engineers.

The experience developing as a person at Central had plenty to play in what I do in the world as a employee and as a woman now.

The years that women have been at Central has taken the Central experience beyond the confined group that it kind of had for years, before women, and it's valuable to know, and it's educational for so many of us, even those of us that have already been students there.

- On a spiritual and social level, it was remarkable how much I learned through the process, how difficult it actually was for the young ladies to integrate the school is underappreciated, and was very much pushed by the men at the time that did not want to let go of what they believed to be the right of a legacy.

And it wasn't fair, and it took not just the 10 years of the lawsuits, it took generations of personal and professional changes to have to happen for my other siblings, I have two other sisters that attended later, to be able to go through Central.

- It was a critical time of development, the first generation of female students at Central in shaping how Central was going to see its role and define its role in its importance to the youth of Philadelphia.

- So a lot of love and respect to NaOmi Richardson who was a veteran and she helped us process the questions.

Pre-production is all about the questions, exploring the ideas, building the team.

We had a couple of moments where the team was waning, some people just had to do other obligations, and we had to recruit for instance Alani Taylor who ended up becoming our champion.

A young lady that went to Central in that aftermath era that succeeded, and went to Ivy League schools, and went on to have a great career.

I grew professionally a lot, to know what it takes to have the weight of a project and it's not gonna be done in a month, it's not gonna be done in six months, and you're gonna have to receive criticism 'cause you have to be better than what you think you can be.

I gained insight into my own career paths.

I am a teacher in the public schools now, partly because I could see how I can best serve.

- A major issue, and to me one of the most major issues for Central right now, is the need to prioritize student population that reflects the demographics of the city.

I have been so disappointed to see how over the last 20 years Central has allowed for its diversity to plummet.

I am encouraged that with the new leadership that that is something that can change, because it is totally something that Central should remember, it can be proud of.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] You see the historical sign and you're like, okay cool.

And then you walk in and you're like, where am I?

Where am I at?

- [Intisar] So in January of 2015, Joaquim, myself and our two kids, we rent apartment C at 1517 West Girard Avenue.

One day my mother-in-Law lets me know that there's a group down the stairs.

I go down with my Philly scowl in place, and there's this beautiful brown woman holding this printout of a photograph.

It's of the building, but it's older, and Marian Anderson is in it and she looks like she's in my apartment, and that's when things really started to change.

(Marian Anderson singing) The Pyramid Club was founded in 1937 in the basement of the Christian Street YMCA.

By 1940, they moved into their permanent home at 1517 West Girard Avenue.

They weren't just any Black social club, they were the Black social club.

One of the things that made them really stand out were their art exhibits, which ran from 1941 to 1957.

So when we arrive in apartment C in 2015, I'm just coming into my own, painting, creating, really with just the basic knowledge that the Pyramid Club existed here and in this building.

But by 2018, when Joaquim and I started doing our own artist residencies in the apartment, the voices of the past got louder and louder.

(ragtime piano music playing) - Humbert Howard was a postman and also member of the Pyramid club, and he was in charge of organizing the exhibitions.

You read about him, he's this very ambitious, entrepreneurial man who's organizing all of the artists, people like Dox Thrash who had been part of the WPA programs in the thirties, and then looking for new fora to display their work, and to be professional artists making money.

Every major collector in Philadelphia attended the exhibitions, so that would include Albert Barnes.

And this was the only real Black gallery space in the early forties, right?

So it was the place to be.

- I am not a visual artist by training.

My early forays into visual art was art in elementary school.

- My foray into art is obviously through Star, like we were a football, basketball family.

So like it you like think of like AC Slater, like, you know what I mean?

Like arts didn't fit into my world until Star, right?

(rhythmic music) - It was a men's club, and not all of the members were necessarily comfortable with the idea of exhibiting art because of certain notions of masculinity I suppose.

But they went with it, you know, and they learned to change some of those notions.

What was the role of women in this men's club?

Because they're very active, we know that they're there, and probably if you just look over the course of a 24 hour day, they're in the building more than the men.

- I feel set up.

(laughing) Like the building knew, the ancestors knew exactly what they were doing.

It felt like people were talking to me, not like out loud, like how they have like the ghost stories like, but it was instruction.

- In all honesty, like when we started doing the artist residencies, I don't know if they were really connected to it.

I don't think we knew what was going on here.

So that's when we started to at least like, first see the connection like, okay, it's a social club, all right.

Now we understand that there's a little bit of history to it.

We just kind of like felt a spirit of like creation in here, right?

It was just turned out to be Star and I, and our kids, going on this journey for the first time.

When I came into the building, just feeling the vibe of it, you know?

And then knowing, you know, the history of the Pyramid Club and I was like, you know what, if this is the last show that I do, first and last, I want it to mean something.

- [Jessica] The light was fantastic.

When you walk in, there's this open room, the kitchen connects to the living room.

There's like a natural flow to that space.

It gave folks the opportunity to walk in to this grand space to be just vast and light and surrounded by artwork.

- Dox Thrash specifically was a artist who did a lot of cityscapes, landscapes, and portraits.

He did that to showcase Black life.

This is also a period where we're talking about, from early 19 hundreds till the 1960s, we're talking about a lot of lynchings that are happening for Black people.

So a lot of artists are responding to that by showing Black people as human beings.

I think because of proximity to New York City and the Harlem Renaissance, and Dox Thrash's work and the artists, that kind of attributed a lot to like a lot of the exhibitions here and the work that's going on here.

- The residency here was so, it was such a turning point for my own work and for just my own like, self-concept I guess as an artist.

And then to have friends and loved ones come to the different shows, and just kind of even just standing back and like having all these different conversations, I feel like I could feel the history a lot.

- [Jessica] It was wonderful having the space, and having the support to mount an exhibit.

- And just knowing that there was a lot of segregation and a lot of rules and regulations that were happening against Black people, and so that was kind of like a necessity for folks, to kind of like have those spaces, those safe spaces and create those spaces for that.

- Just the idea of a space dedicated to the exhibition of Black artists, and art related to the Black experience in the United States.

That's part of the history of this space, and you know, that was a rarity in the middle 20th century.

- I've learned a lot about the Pyramid Club.

Again, the obvious pointers, it was a social group, started by Black folks in the city because they couldn't get in anywhere else, so they started their own.

So the idea of ownership of space, to me that's a privilege, and people don't understand that either.

I don't know if we live in another building, at that same time, that doesn't have that history, if everything happens the same way for us, the way that it did.

(recording of Marian Anderson plays) ♪ I got a harp, you got a harp ♪ ♪ All God's children got a harp ♪ ♪ When I get to heaven gonna play on my harp ♪ ♪ Gonna play all over God's heaven ♪ ♪ Heaven, heaven ♪ ♪ Everybody talking 'bout heaven and going there ♪ ♪ Heaven, heaven ♪ ♪ Gonna play all over God's heaven ♪ - Our connection to the Pyramid Club is really just through our residence.

We stumbled across living in a historic building, and from there it kind of generated its own self.

So we were at the Pyramid Club, or at 1517 living our life, going through our normal everyday thing, and then we stumbled across someone showing photos of what 1517 used to be.

- This experience with the Pyramid Club and living in that space is a Philadelphia history nerd girl's dream.

Like I grew up in the neighborhood and knew nothing about it.

I'm a lifelong North Philadelphian, my mother is, my grandmother is, my grandparents are.

And I asked them about it, and they knew nothing about it, and I grew right up around the corner.

- For me, this is obviously my first like move into this space of historical documentation, telling the story, video making, documentary making.

So it was a huge undertaking, and it wasn't something that we took on lightly in regards to understanding the story, the connection that we were trying to make, and really being able to tell the story in an authentic way.

- The Pyramid Club in Studio 1517 is so important to me because growing up in that neighborhood, it's very reminiscent of what you could hear on the news now of just how awful it is, how dreadful it is, how dirty it is, how much that people don't care.

And I'm hearing that in one ear, but my lived life is a very different thing.

I'm in a community with people who love and care for one another.

- As I tell this story to my kids of where we live, now I get to tell the story of the Black excellence.

I get to tell the story of, right, like we're an apartment in North Philly, but look at what this was, look at where you were, look at who was here, look at what it's inspired.

- If it wasn't for the Blockson Archive at Temple, with the photographs of John Mosley, we may have been able to find it referenced in newspapers, but to see it like there's just, and such an intimate portrayals, you know, like it wasn't just, it was photographed from the outside, it was photographed from within.

- When we were filming this, we were out in Westchester.

We had, this summer we made the transition to move back to Philadelphia and we moved back into the space.

So we are now in the process of decorating the space, but the block has changed.

It's not the same as it was when we left five years ago.

- This is also a love story.

As much as it's a history story, and an urban preservation story, it's still very much just like two Philly kids who fell in love, and.

- Stumbled across this wonderful place and it just like, boom.

All these other things kind of like spawned from it.

- It's our own Eden, like Eden is North Philly to me.

(rhythmic percussion music) (music continues) - [Presenter] Major funding for this program was provided by.