By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed. The difference of a few points on a single test could mean placement or exclusion from a regular class with academic instruction. CRMD classes - or classes for “children with retarded mental development” as they were called by the Board of Education - had much lower expectations for students and too frequently had teachers who were not trained to support students with intellectual and other disabilities.1
Italian immigrant Leonard Covello was the principal of East Harlem’s Benjamin Franklin High School, an all-boys school. Drawing on his own experience immigrating to the US, Covello wanted to create a school where students’ home cultures could connect to the school’s. Early in the 20th century, most of Franklin’s students were Italian American. Covello created spaces within the school to welcome parents and community members, including through specific Italian American clubs, and extended the school out into the community. He opened a multilingual library and a job placement center on a street close to the school, and welcomed students and parents there.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Benjamin Franklin High School was a dynamic place. Its students came from all over the world to the East Harlem campus. Many were Italian American immigrants; others had migrated from Puerto Rico or were Black migrants from the Jim Crow South. The high school’s principal was interested in ways to connect community and school, and political action was one activity he encouraged to this end.1 Students participated in war-related campaigns to gather or save resources, including paper, during the war.
Benjamin Franklin High School students came together in clubs that celebrated their cultural identities, like Club Borinquen and clubs focused on Italian American culture. And they worked together on projects to make change in the world, as when they gathered resources to help in the effort to win World War II.
On April 16, 1937, Lucile Spence and the Teachers Union of New York organized a conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in downtown Manhattan to discuss schools in Harlem.
On March 19, 1935, rumors spread through Harlem that police had beaten a young man to death after they arrested him for allegedly stealing a knife from a local store. As New York Police Department officers regularly used violence in policing the neighborhood, the rumor was believable, even if it was not in fact true. Nevertheless, the rumor sparked a revolt by community members concerned about policing and many other kinds of injustice due to racism and the impact of the Great Depression. The police responded to the uprising with violence, resulting in the death of three Black men, more than 100 arrests, and at least another 100 people injured.1
School zones establish where students go to school, often on the basis of where they live. This map shows how the New York City Board of Education zoned Wadleigh High School, an all-girls school, during the 1930s and 1940s. It shows the school zone lines and population data from the 1940 US Census to illustrate who was living in the area at this time.
Who were New York City’s students? This seemingly simple question became the focus of a citywide research project led by the Board of Education. From 1931 to 1947, the Board sent an index card like this one to each of its hundreds of schools. Those schools served a massive and still-growing population of students born in New York City, students who had been born outside the US (often in Europe or the Caribbean), and students who had been born in the US South and had participated in the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities like New York. Through this migration, New York City’s small Black population grew very quickly in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.1
In March 1925, The Survey Graphic published a special issue. The national magazine with a predominantly white readership invited Alain Locke to guest-edit the issue. He wrote that the issue was meant “to document the New Negro culturally and socially,—to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years.” The issue explored the origins of jazz and “Negro folk music,” the “inner life of Harlem,” the community’s “organizing social forces,” the neighborhood’s youth, and the conditions of the schools they attended.1
The Brownies’ Book included different kinds of writing, visual art, and photography by adults. But it also included letters from readers. Black children from around the United States who read the magazine sometimes wrote back.1 What they chose to write about tells us what The Brownies’ Book meant to them and what was happening in their lives.
The NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book to speak directly to Black children about the world and their lives. The images in the magazine were a key part of how the magazine worked to help its readers know (in the language of the time) that “being ‘colored’ is a normal, beautiful thing.” The creators also gave this issue the title “I am an American Citizen.”1
Here are a few pages from the first issue of the magazine. The editors of the magazine made many choices about their publication. They chose the text and articles, the images, the design, and more. Looking carefully at what they produced helps us think about their goals for the publication.
In 1905, French psychologist and educator Albert Binet created a tool that he hoped would help to identify and understand children who were struggling in school. Binet’s scale identified particular tasks that a “normal” child was supposed to be able to complete by a given age. This came to be called the person’s “mental age,” meaning that an 18 year old who could complete the tasks listed for a 12 year old but not those of older children would be said to have a “mental age” of 12. Binet did not think that the scale measured student’s natural intelligence, and he thought that intelligence could change over time.1
Who should have made decisions about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of children in New York City’s schools? Increasingly in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the first decades of the 1900s, social reformers celebrated the idea that experts should be the ones to make key decisions. These social reformers - primarily white people from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds - saw many problems in the city around them. They were concerned about crime, public health, food safety, and children’s lives, among other areas. And they felt confident that they had the knowledge and skills to address these problems effectively, rather than the many thousands of working-class and poor New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, who made up the majority of the city’s population.1
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working. In these years, the school system created a variety of special classes and schools for Disabled children, as well as for students who skipped school or otherwise got into trouble. Deaf students went to specialized schools for a few years, and then were expected to join their non-disabled peers in general education classrooms. Blind students were also intended to learn beside their non-disabled peers with the help of special instructors. The Board of Education created ungraded classes for children with intellectual disabilities, who educators thought should be segregated from other children and learn different subjects. Though not specifically mentioned in this document, some children with physical disabilities received home instruction because architectural barriers kept them from accessing school buildings.
Many photos of New York City schools in the early 20th century show so many students that it is hard to see them as individual people. Photographer Florence Maynard spent several days inside public schools in the city, and her photos gave a closer view than most. Here, we see a group of students who seem to be of a range of ages. Most have light skin, and one is darker-skinned. They appear to be happy or excited — perhaps because, as Maynard noted in her caption, they were “well-doers on the way to receive the principal’s commendation,” or award.
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell. Farrell had been working with Lillian Wald and other reformers at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Henry Street was built to provide community support and education to new immigrants to New York City, most of them from southern and eastern Europe.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco worked for more than five years, with her husband and on her own, to fight for educational equality and desegregation. She pushed schools in the town of Jamaica, and then the board of education in Queens, and then the New York State Legislature, to end school segregation and provide equal opportunity for her children.1 A few days after the New York State Legislature passed a bill ending legal segregation in schools, Mrs. Cisco attended a gathering at a local Black church in the state capital of Albany. The newspaper captured the scene with the small description you see above.
Photography has an important place in African American history. When racist practices and beliefs denied Black people’s dignity and humanity, Black individuals and families with the means to do so could go to a photography studio and present themselves as they wanted the world to see them. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery, used photography to spread the powerful image of himself that he wanted the world to see and recognize. Douglass made himself the most photographed person in the US in the 19th century, in a time when cameras were large, cumbersome, and expensive, and could be accessed only by going to a photography studio.1
Mrs. Cisco’s activism brought attention to segregated schooling in New York, and the state adopted a new law that ended legal segregation in schools. This legislation was regularly referred to as the “Elsberg Bill” because state Senator Nathaniel Elsberg introduced the bill. This Brooklyn Daily Eagle story narrates the events leading up to the bill’s passage, different responses after its signing, and the response of Mrs. Cisco’s attorney George Wallace.
