This article examines the impact of African American migration into Kansas City, Missouri, on the city's segregated school system in the 1940s and early 1950s. Substantial increases in the number of African American elementary school-age children produced chronic overcrowding in the segregated black schools, which was not easily relieved due to the legal requirement to operate racially segregated schools. In order to address the crowding, the school district was compelled on four occasions in the late 1940s and early 1950s to convert an entire school from white use to African American use. In each case, the school district took the symbolic step of changing the name of the school so that it was clearly identifiable as a school for African American students. The school district's practice of renaming schools coded those schools by race and further signaled that the surrounding area had become a black neighborhood.