Samuel B. Cisco, a Black man, lived in Jamaica, in Queens County. At the time of this newspaper article, in 1896, Queens was not yet part of New York City, and Jamaica was a small town surrounded by a rural landscape. Mr. Cisco ran a successful scavenger business. He and his wife Elizabeth had six children.1 Although Mrs. Cisco is less visible in the article, she worked alongside her husband and continued their fight for years after his passing.
Many New Yorkers lived in poverty in the 1890s, and depended on their children to work to help support the family. Other young people had to make their way without families, and worked to support themselves. Therefore, these children did not attend school (which was not necessarily illegal at the time). Charitable or non-profit organizations like the Children’s Aid Society were founded by wealthy New Yorkers to help improve the living conditions of children who were working rather than attending school.
New York City’s rapid growth in the 1880s and 1890s meant a dramatically increasing number of children in the city, and in schools. Not every child in New York attended school. Starting in 1874 New York State had laws that required students of some ages to attend school, but there was little enforcement and there were loopholes that allowed families to keep children out of school if the family said they needed the child to work. Continued racial segregation by law in some parts of the city limited Black students’ access to some schools. Meanwhile some Disabled children were not considered eligible for schooling, so these young people were excluded from school.1
In the 1830s, the City purchased Randall’s Island to use as a remote burial ground for the poor and as an almshouse. Blackwell’s and Wards Islands were purchased later, and more institutions were built on the three islands to house and care for “various indigent, criminal, ill, poor, and disabled populations.”1 Journalist W. H. Davenport visited the “Insane Asylum” and “Orphanage and Idiot Asylum,” publishing his accounts of the residents and life in those facilities.2 The articles give a view of the conditions in these early reform institutions. Non-disabled children at the orphanage were taught in classes overseen by the NYC Department of Education. Children with physical disabilities (of which there were many) were taught how to craft products that could be sold. Children at the “Idiot Asylum” also had classes with a goal of preparing them for “useful occupations.”3
Édouard Séguin learned how to teach children with intellectual disabilities when he lived in France. Later, Séguin moved to the US and helped found schools around the country.
Many blind people lived in dire conditions in the city almshouse for the poor, because they were not able to support themselves and had no other place to go. After visiting the city almshouse with Samuel Akerly in 1831, John D. Russ decided to found the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. Russ brought three blind boys from the almshouse’s ward for blind men on Blackwell’s Island (in the East River and near Randall’s Island). He took them to a widow’s home for care and education. This small class was the first known attempt to educate blind children in the United States. Several other children joined the following year, learning through experimental techniques to teach reading and writing used by other educators. After a period of instruction, the boys took a public examination to show the value and effectiveness of educating the blind, and as an appeal to philanthropists to donate money to the cause.1
Sign language is believed to have been in use by different peoples, including Native Americans, for many centuries.1 Systems for signing the alphabet were used by monks in the Middle Ages,2 and formal Deaf education started in Europe as early as the 16th century, when the first hearing aids were invented.3 The first private school for the Deaf was founded by a British man, Thomas Braidwood, in the late 1700s. Braidwood is believed to have used a combination of sign language and oral techniques like lip reading and training in “articulation”—working on making speech sounds, even if they are difficult or impossible for a deaf person to hear.4 An early American educator of the deaf, Thomas Gallaudet, wanted to learn these teaching methods to bring them back to the US, but Braidwood was secretive about his techniques.5 Gallaudet learned “manualism” from French educators and became an advocate for educating Deaf people only in sign language. Because there are many causes and varying degrees of deafness or hearing loss, different students needed different educational methods.
