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.
The historical documents found on this website are primary sources: historical records produced in one moment in time, that help us understand that moment in time. This podcast is a primary source that shows how two people living today - the podcast producers - understand how and why schools are changing in their neighborhood. Their work also includes other primary sources, including historical recordings and interviews with people who reflect on their personal experience with schools in their community. They share their perspectives on charter schools, district public schools, and their impact on children and communities in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
As Denise Oliver describes in this video, women involved in the civil rights movement faced sexism within their organizations, even when those organizations said they were committed to liberation and freedom. In addition to Oliver’s community organizing, she also challenged the misogyny within the ranks of the Young Lords Party. In collaboration with Iris Morales and other women in the party, Oliver pushed against masculinist ideas and for more complete ideas of liberation. As a result of this work, the Young Lords withdrew its idea of “Revolutionary Machismo” as necessary for liberation. They elected women to the Central Committee and pushed for representation of women in all levels of leadership. The party instituted punishments for sexist behavior within the party, formed a gay caucus as well as men and women’s caucuses for addressing sexism; and committed to ensuring equal participation between men and women as writers and public speakers.1
This mural of Evelina López Antonetty was painted by graffiti artist group Tats Cru in 2011. It is at 773 Prospect Ave in the South Bronx. In the mural, the artists refer to some of the terms that local residents used to refer to Antonetty. She was affectionately nicknamed the “mother of the Puerto Rican Community” and the “hell lady of the Bronx” for her unyielding activism and support of the Puerto Rican community.
Among New York City students with disability labels today, most are in the category of “learning disability.” This category came into existence in the 1960s, when parent advocates, educators, and psychologists wanted to figure out how to understand students who were struggling with skills like reading or arithmetic, but who did not otherwise seem to have intellectual disabilities.1 Dyslexia, for example, is one kind of learning disability.
Disabled students have always attended New York City schools, whether they were identified as disabled or not. Unfortunately, almost all of the ways New York City schools have tried to support Disabled students have involved students’ being separated from their peers. Students have attended separate schools, separate classrooms within schools, or have been pulled out of classrooms for part of the day. They have faced barriers to their full participation – like architectural barriers, or a lack of accommodations or teacher support. As a result, many students have felt that they were being treated differently – and less well than – their peers without disability labels.
Puerto Ricans became citizens of the United States in 1917, as part of the US’s claiming control of the island. As US citizens, those who wanted to come to the mainland faced fewer barriers than immigrants from other countries. In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans made the choice to migrate. Many came to New York City. Racial segregation in housing meant that they often lived alongside Black families like Toni Cade Bambara’s in Harlem. They also lived alongside Italian-American and Black families in East Harlem and the Lower East Side.
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.
In the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, many Black and Latinx neighborhoods were impoverished and their residents were struggling. Some landlords decided they could make more money by burning down their buildings—where people had been living—than by renting them out to individuals and families. This led to many dangerous fires, especially in the South Bronx. Once the fires were put out, they left behind damaged buildings and piles of rubble. Nonetheless, there were families and children living, growing, and playing in these areas.1
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.
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.
As institutions became more widespread, more parents sent their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities away, hoping they would be rehabilitated and come home. Many of them never did. New York built five institutions for Disabled people, starting in 1855 with a state school in Syracuse, and followed by schools in Rome, Newark, and Letchworth Village. The city also operated an “Idiot School” or “Asylum” on Randall’s Island.
In 1970, about one quarter of all New York City public school students were Puerto Rican. And in some parts of the city, like the South Bronx, that proportion was much higher, around 65 percent.1 Many Puerto Rican students spoke Spanish at home, but the local public schools operated almost exclusively in English.
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
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.
