In the East Harlem community control district, teachers emphasized subjects that connected to their students’ African heritage. They also made use of the school’s physical spaces to recognize Black history, including in programs that welcomed members of the community around the school.1
New York State’s 1969 decentralization law drew strong opposition from many Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who had been advocating for community control. United Bronx Parents was based in the South Bronx and had been founded in 1965 by Puerto Rican organizer Evelina López Antonetty. United Bronx Parents had worked for years to support Puerto Rican mothers in pushing for better education for their children. Community control fit within this agenda.
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During the 1968 teacher strike, community control advocates continued to participate in leading local school districts and arguing for self-determination in education. UFT teachers protested during the strike in public spaces like in front of City Hall. Here, community control advocates walk across the Brooklyn bridge to show their support for local democratic power in education. One of the figures in the front is Rhody McCoy, who was the superintendent of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control district in Brooklyn, where a controversy over whether local districts could fire teachers prompted the strike.
This video captures New York City parents speaking of their desires for community control of their children’s schools. They wanted to have a voice in public schools in their local community, and to ensure that students achieved the equal education that was their right. They were motivated, as one parent pointed out, by their experience with poor conditions in their children’s schools.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City. In the spring of 1968, the district’s governing board decided to fire 19 white teachers. Those teachers were affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The local community board and parents believed the union and its members were actively working against the community-control experiment that they had recently achieved. The UFT argued that the local board did not have the authority to fire those teachers. The UFT called a strike at the start of the next school year.1
Located near the town of Hunter, New York, in the Catskill Mountains (a few hours from New York City), Camp Jened was unusual at the time for its focus on Disabled campers.1
Over 1 million new Black Southern migrants and Puerto Rican immigrants had settled in New York City by the 1950s. Most resided in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn. They faced many barriers, including poverty and discrimination in employment and housing discrimination, and often attended schools that the Board of Education had long neglected. The city’s centralized school system had often ignored Black residents’ demands while prioritizing the needs and wants of white students and their families.1
The grounds of Camp Jened included a river, a lake with a dock for boating and places to row, swimming facilities, and a stream that was great for fishing.1 Camp Jened also had a large grassy field where campers and counselors gathered to play baseball.
Organizing in the early 1960s by the Citywide Committee on Integration and by Reverend Milton Galamison had increased public attention to the “600” schools. After newspaper coverage of misconduct by teachers and administrators at a “600” school in Brooklyn, as well as criticism over the schools being racially segregated, the Board of Education created a special committee to study conditions inside these schools. After two years of study, the report, “‘600’ Schools Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," was delivered to the superintendent of schools in September 1966. The report acknowledged that the “600” schools were “ethnically unbalanced” and attributed this imbalance to the “many social problems and pressures to which these children are exposed,” rather than “mental illness.” While acknowledging that many problems existed within the “600” school system, the committee also highlighted the strengths of the program and the number of students who moved through the system, many of whom were considered “rehabilitated” and returned to the regular school system. They cited a need for more funding, personnel, and training to address the problems and improve the system.
Civil rights organizers in Lowndes County, Mississippi, chose the image of a black panther as their symbol. They were fighting for voting rights and democratic power as part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. For decades, although Black voters were the majority of the population there, they had been locked out of voting by racist restrictions.
The Black Panther Party’s Harlem Branch, founded in 1966, defined Black Power as “having the right to self-determination or the power to decide what should go down in our community,” and “being the decision makers, the policy makers.”1
The 1965 boycott targeted segregation in New York City’s junior high schools and “600” schools. But for 2000 students - primarily Black and Puerto Rican boys - who attended the “600” day schools, those schools were places they were sent because they were labeled by the schools as “socially maladjusted” or “emotionally disturbed.” Some of the students had been ordered to attend these schools after interactions with the police and the juvenile legal system. Most students did not find a supportive educational environment there, and those who had disabilities did not receive the support they needed.
In the fall of 1964, months after the massive February 1964 boycott, Reverend Milton Galamison and the Citywide Committee on Integration launched another boycott. Galamison and the Citywide Committee - which included CORE (Congress On Racial Equality), Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, Harlem Parents’ Committee, EQUAL, and the Negro Teachers Association - focused on the city’s junior high schools and the “600” schools, which had inadequate facilities, no curriculum, untrained teachers, and improperly screened students. The groups’ demands included promoting many more Black and Puerto Rican teachers to leadership positions like school principal, desegregating junior high schools, and improving the “600” schools. Reverend Galamison was arrested for violating state education laws by “encouraging truancy” when young people stayed out of school to boycott.
In the summer of 1964, the New York City Board of Education issued a very modest plan for desegregation. The plan would pair eight schools in segregated Black areas of Brooklyn and Queens with a few segregated white schools, also in Brooklyn and Queens. This “pairing” was a common approach to desegregation at the time. White parents opposed the desegregation plan, and rallied against “busing” or “forced transfers” of their white students to new and desegregating schools - or the transfer of Black students to their local white schools.1 They claimed they were fighting for “neighborhood schools” and that their opposition to “busing” was about their children’s safety, not maintaining segregated schools.
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on June 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin. The Act banned segregation in public places, including schools, parks, theaters, and hotels, and it denied the use of federal funds for any program that practiced segregation. The Act even authorized the Office of Education to assist in facilitating school desegregation.
Reverend Milton Galamison was the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and a key figure in the struggle to desegregate New York City’s schools. As a religious and civic leader, he was the chair of the Education Committee for the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, founded the Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, and organized the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. The Citywide Committee was a collaboration between the Parents’ Workshop, the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League, and the Harlem Parents’ Committee to organize the 1964 boycott.
In this op-ed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes about the “school boycott concept” and its application across the country, particularly in the North. He is writing more than two months after the February 1964 boycott, and nearly a month after the March one in New York City. There had been other large-scale school boycotts in other cities, too, as in Chicago in 1963.
On March 12, 1964 - between the first 1964 pro-integration boycott and the second - a group of white parents calling themselves “Parents and Taxpayers” led a march from the Board of Education building in Brooklyn to City Hall in Manhattan. White parents had organized and protested in favor of segregation earlier, as in the 1959 boycotts. This time, Parents and Taxpayers used many of the same protest tactics that civil rights activists used: marches and boycotts. They also claimed that they had to act to protect their rights, which they thought were threatened by desegregation plans. The name they chose for their group is important to notice. As historian Matthew Delmont has observed, by calling themselves Parents and Taxpayers, “these white protestors made an implicit claim that they occupied a higher level of citizenship than Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who were also parents and taxpayers.”1
After the massive turnout for the February 3, 1964 boycott, there was little response from the Board of Education. Organizer Reverend Milton Galamison and other desegregation advocates sought to keep the pressure on, pushing the Board to produce a meaningful desegregation plan. They called for a second boycott to take place on March 16, 1964.
