On the day of the February 3 boycott, some participants gathered at the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, where they marched and picketed.
This proposal for a Freedom School in the North comes after Freedom Summer (1964) in Mississippi and after some of the school boycotts in New York, Boston, and Chicago.
The flier designed by two Queens civil rights organizing groups - the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - calls for a boycott to protest segregation in New York City’s public schools.
Five years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the New York City Board of Education announced a plan to desegregate a few schools in Brooklyn and Queens.
On October 28, 1958, in two separate cases, the Board of Education charged the “Harlem Nine” parents with violating the state law requiring parents to send their children to school.
In 1958, one year after nine Black students made national and international news when they desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregation activists in Harlem organized their own protest.
Camp Jened was located in the northern Catskills, on over 250 acres (which is about ⅓ the size of Central Park, or as big as 250 football fields) with 22 buildings near the town of Hunter, New York.
Harlem residents like Ella Baker and Mae Mallory, alongside other parents and community members in Brooklyn and in Jamaica, Queens, pushed the New York City Board of Education to integrate their schools.
In its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional because separate schools for Black children were “inherently unequal.