Concern about school segregation was not only expressed during the school boycott. On March 1, 1964, Puerto Rican community organizations held a civil rights march in front of City Hall. They were joined by a range of other organizations, including the New York Urban League and the Jamaica NAACP, and representatives of several labor unions including District 65 of the AFL-CIO and SEIU local 1199. Based on the content of marcher’s signs, segregation in education was a major concern for the marchers.1
During the February 3, 1964 boycott, there was a rally at City Hall. Students, teachers, and parents who were participating in the boycott gathered together to send a message to the mayor that they wanted action on desegregation. Simultaneously, small and large gatherings took place at schools around the city. Jimmy Brooks, a reporter from one of New York’s Black newspapers, the Amsterdam News, interviewed many participants. Their comments help us hear why people chose to participate in the boycott.
On February 3, 1964, an estimated 464,400 students - almost half the city’s enrollment - boycotted New York City’s segregated school system. Getting that many people to stay out of school and walk on picket lines in front of schools, all peacefully, required a great deal of work. So did organizing Freedom Schools, where children who were out of school could be safe, have meals, and learn.
Here a black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, reflects on how others spoke about the February 3 boycott both before and after it happened. They comment on how a white newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, had covered the boycott. Other white newspapers, including The New York Times, had been very critical of the boycott before it happened.
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. Later they decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. This silent film footage, an excerpt of one of several reels taken that day by the New York Police Department, captures the participants and their posters and slogans. Although the footage doesn’t have sound, it still captures the atmosphere of the day.
The second school boycott took place on March 16, 1964. Although fewer people participated in the second boycott than the first, protests against the city’s segregated and unequal school systems remained strong. Black New Yorkers held different opinions on the source of oppression and how to respond to it. The organizers of the boycotts, for instance, believed that school integration provided a way to move towards a more equal society. Some, like Malcolm X, supported Black nationalism, which promoted economic self-sufficiency, pride in Black identity, and the formation of an independent nation. However, despite these differing views, Malcolm X took part in the second boycott, and he describes why he participated in this interview.
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. It shows Baker’s approach as a teacher. Students at the Freedom School would examine why the boycotts took place, how segregation in the South and the North were similar, and how they experienced racism in places like New York. The outline also shows her insistence that northerners recognize and examine racism on their home terrain, not only in the Jim Crow South.
The Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools included several New York City civil rights organizations. They produced this flier to recruit participants for the February 3, 1964 boycott. They used different kinds of text and a photograph to make their argument that a boycott was important and necessary.
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.
In late 1963, The Amsterdam News reported on allegations that teachers and administrators at P.S. 614 in Brooklyn, one of the city’s “600” schools. The teachers being investigated allegedly pocketed over 40,000 subway tokens meant for students. Instead of handing the tokens out, students were forced to perform menial tasks like washing cars or shining shoes to earn the tokens back. Not only were students being mistreated, they were being denied education. The school’s principal and administrators didn’t offer any information at the time but were later reassigned to a different school.
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. Black and Puerto Rican students who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, would be bused to a few schools in the Glendale-Ridgewood area of Queens, where the schools were all-white. Parents, and particularly white mothers, organized this protest.
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. Judge Nathaniel Kaplan was the presiding family court judge in the case involving four of the parents. He found them guilty of violating the law.1 But less than two weeks later, two of the parents had their case heard by a different judge. Judge Justine Polier dismissed the charges against the parents in her courtroom.
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. Nine mothers in Harlem decided to keep their children out of local junior high schools to protest both segregation and the conditions in those schools. They knew that their children’s schools had poorer facilities, a more limited curriculum, and more unlicensed teachers than the city’s segregated white schools. The press called these parents the “Harlem Nine,” echoing how the Little Rock students had been called the “Little Rock Nine.”1
Camp Jened was a private camp, and it charged campers’ families for attendance. Founders Leona Burger and Honora Rubenstein reported that they kept the fees as low as possible. But not everyone could afford to pay these fees.1
For Camp Jened to be accessible to Disabled children and adults, staff and counselors had to work well with campers. Some of the staff at Camp Jened were disabled themselves, but all received training in how to support Disabled youth and adults.1
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. The camp’s founders designed it to welcome Disabled children and adults, who did not often have access to summer camps and outdoor recreation. Camp Jened was the first camp of its kind for Disabled youth in New York and first opened in July 1953. It ran until August of 1977, and then reopened in 1980.1
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. They gathered information about conditions in schools serving Black and Latinx students, and conducted “street meetings” where parents and interested community members could talk with each other about their concerns.
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.” Citing the work of Black psychologist and City College professor Kenneth Clark, among others, the court argued that segregated schools were unconstitutional because segregation taught a message of racial superiority for white students and racial inferiority for Black students.1
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more. She pushed for freedom. Baker saw the pursuit of liberation as a collective effort, and she valued the views and passions of young people. As historian Barbara Ransby put it in her biography on Ella Baker, Baker believed “people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out…Baker’s pedagogy was democratic and reciprocal…her view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base.”1
