Transcript: At school, when we interacted, initially, signing was not allowed, that we’d be punished if we used signing. We only signed when we knew the teachers weren’t looking. We hid our signs. But when we were outside of school, we used sign freely. When groups of us went on trips, we signed. So, for me, I didn’t sleep at the school. I commuted back and forth between home and school on the train and it was a lot of fun. When class was over, at 2:30, we couldn’t wait to get together and get on the train. You know, in New York City, we had an area where we would all meet that was well known, under the 14th Street train. We’d gather and converse and just have a great time. I enjoyed that so much. We didn’t have student clubs or groups, so that time at 14th Street was what we did. We met as a group and had a good time together. Also, we did have sports teams. They were run by Deaf clubs. So, interacting and spending time in that setting exposed me to many great things.
When she was growing up in Harlem in the 1940s, Reverend Malika Leigh Whitney played a lot of street games, like hopscotch, jacks, stick ball, and stoop ball. But she loved jumping Double Dutch the most.
After Camp Jened closed in 1977, many former campers stayed connected to one another. The sense of community and possibility they built at camp became an inspiration and source of strength for the developing disability rights movement.1
Two Black Harlem police officers, Mike Walker and Ulysses Williams, founded the first Annual World International Double Dutch competition in 1974. Having grown up watching Black girls play the two-jump-rope game throughout their neighborhood, Walker and Williams wanted to encourage more girls to play. They created a rule book for the game, and incorporated aspects of other sports (like compulsory tricks, speed testing, and freestyle). They also established the international tournament and a citywide league. Walker and Williams lobbied physical education teachers in the city’s intermediate schools to incorporate the sport into their classes, and encourage girls to join the league where they could enjoy the low-cost sports pastime.
The Eighth Annual World International Double Dutch competition took place at Lincoln Center in 1981. It had grown dramatically since two New York City police officers began the tournament in 1974.
By the 1980s, Audre Lorde was working full-time as a writer. She had published essays and poetry. She had also been fighting cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 1978.
Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death. When she was an infant and a toddler, doctors encouraged Mrs. Goodman and her husband to place Marguerite in an institution. Her doctors predicted that Marguerite would not live beyond two years, and they told her parents that they could send her away.
In early 1979, the Board of Education decided to change the rules for private bus operators in a way that would have lowered wages for many drivers. More than 2,000 bus drivers went on strike for over 13 weeks.
Many major changes in education have come through federal legislation. The GI Bill of 1944 provided support for college tuition for former soldiers, many who would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act led to the expansion of women’s access to sports in schools.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
Under decentralized school governance, each community school district had its own school board, and members of that board were elected by parents and voters who lived within the community school district’s boundaries. (It’s important to specify parents and voters because parents who were not citizens, and therefore could not vote in most elections, could vote in community school board elections where their children attended school.)
According to New York’s Black newspaper the Amsterdam News, Double Dutch is “a skip-rope activity in which two ropes are turned in eggbeater fashion by two rope turners while a third person jumps within the moving ropes.”1 Double Dutch was a joyful form of exercise and in some cases competition. This image likely came from a Double Dutch tournament at Lincoln Center in New York.
Palante was a self-published newspaper in which the various branches of the Young Lords Party highlighted important issues in their communities. They examined social issues through a critical lens that unearthed how colonialism, capitalism, and racism created problems for Puerto Rican communities.
Born in 1948, Iris Morales was the child of Puerto Rican migrants to New York. Morales’ political development began early as she recognized the barriers her parents faced in trying to access their rights as citizens. “As a child of migrants,” she would later recall, “we don’t speak the language, we don’t know how to navigate the court system, we don’t know how to access our rights.” In addition to her parents’ struggle in New York, Morales also learned the depths of inequality and segregation by watching “the horrific TV images of the civil rights movement.” She discussed the movement with her friends in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and acted in a school play produced by an NAACP youth group. She also participated in the 1964 student boycott of New York City’s schools, and worked as a tenants’ rights organizer.1
Denise Oliver, born in Brooklyn in 1947, grew up in Queens. Her father, George Bodine Oliver, was a drama professor, a Tuskegee Airman, and one of the first Black actors to integrate Broadway in the 1940s. He was also active in New York’s Black leftist political circles, working alongside members of the Communist Party and their allies. Her mother, Marjorie Roberts Oliver, taught at a high school in Queens when Black teachers were a small proportion of the city’s teaching force.1 Eventually, Denise Oliver would follow in the educational footsteps of her parents and work as a teacher. She first taught at University of the Streets, a school for youth of color who had been pushed out or expelled from the city’s schools.2
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
Although City College, where Audre Lorde taught, was in the predominantly Black and Latinx community of Harlem, there were very few Black or Latinx students who attended. In the 1968-1969 school year, City College students organized to demand change in admissions policies, curriculum, and support. They identified five demands:
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
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.
