Judy Heumann Oral History
Judith (Judy) Heumann was one of tens of thousands of children who contracted polio during outbreaks in the late 1940s and early 1950s and became physically disabled.
Queens
Deaf Students Protest New School Head
Gallaudet University in Washington, DC was one of the earliest US schools for the Deaf and the world’s only university for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
Willie Mae Goodman and Marguerite Goodman
Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death.
Parents and Taxpayers March to City Hall on Film
On March 12, 1964 - between the first 1964 pro-integration boycott and the second - a group of white parents calling themselves “Parents and Taxpayers” led a march from the Board of Education building in Brooklyn to City Hall in Manhattan.
Why the School Boycott?
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.
White Queens Mothers Protest Desegregation
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.
Jim Crow School Kids as Mentally Unfit
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco
Photography has an important place in African American history.
The Elsberg Bill Signed
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.
People ex rel. Cisco v. School Board of Queens, excerpt
After a few years of pushing for desegregation of the local Jamaica schools, Mrs.
Cisco on Trial in Queens
Samuel B. Cisco, a Black man, lived in Jamaica, in Queens County.