Stanley Branche

Stanley Everett Branche (July 31, 1933 – December 22, 1992) was an American civil rights leader from Pennsylvania who worked as executive secretary in the Chester, Pennsylvania, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and founded the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN).

In the early 1960s, he and George Raymond partnered to challenge minority hiring practices of businesses and initiated the Chester school protests against de facto segregation of schools which made Chester one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights movement. He protested with the Cambridge Movement in Dorchester County, Maryland, and worked with Cecil B. Moore to desegregate Girard College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He worked with the Greater Chester Movement and the Black Coalition in Philadelphia. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Chester in 1967 and twice for U.S. Congress in 1978 and 1986. He left the civil rights movement and ran multiple businesses including co-ownership of a nightclub in Philadelphia with drug kingpin, Major Coxson. In 1989, he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison for his participation in an organized crime collection scheme.

Branche served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 127th Regimental Combat Team in the Korean War. He was decorated three times. After the war, he attended the Combs College of Music and the Pennsylvania Institute of Criminology with the intent to be a policeman.

Branche participated in the Cambridge Movement in Dorchester County, Maryland, as the field secretary for the NAACP. He was one of the signatories of "The Treaty of Cambridge" which initiated desegregation in the city. He returned to Chester in 1962 and his wife Anna introduced him to George Raymond, president of the Chester branch of the NAACP. Branche was initially assigned to the campaign to desegregate the Great Leopard Skating Rink. Branche and Raymond partnered to successfully challenge the minority hiring practices of large department stores, clothing shops, shoe stores and other specialty shops in downtown Chester.

By the fall of 1963, Branche became frustrated with the gradualist approach of Raymond and the NAACP. He resigned and created a new activist organization named the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) along with the Swarthmore College chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and Chester parents to end de facto segregation of public schools and improve conditions at predominantly black schools in Chester.

In 1962, Branche and the CFFN focused on improving conditions at the predominantly black Franklin Elementary school in Chester. Although the school was built to house 500 students, it had become overcrowded with 1,200 students. The school's average class-size was 39, twice the number of nearby all-white schools. The school was built in 1910 and had never been updated. Only two bathrooms were available for the entire school.

In November 1963, CFFN protesters blocked the entrance to Franklin Elementary school and the Chester Municipal Building resulting in the arrest of 240 protesters. Following public attention to the protests stoked by media coverage of the mass arrests, the mayor and school board negotiated with the CFFN and NAACP. The Chester Board of Education agreed to reduce class sizes at Franklin school, remove unsanitary toilet facilities, relocate classes held in the boiler room and coal bin and repair school grounds.

Emboldened by the success of the Franklin Elementary school demonstrations, the CFFN recruited new members, sponsored voter registration drives and planned a citywide boycott of Chester schools. Branche built close ties with students at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Military College and Cheyney State College in order to ensure large turnouts at demonstrations and protests. Branche invited Dick Gregory and Malcolm X to Chester to participate in the "Freedom Now Conference" and other national civil rights leaders such as Gloria Richardson came to Chester in support of the demonstrations.