This proposal for a Freedom School in the North comes after Freedom Summer (1964) in Mississippi and after some of the school boycotts in New York, Boston, and Chicago. It shows Baker’s approach as a teacher. Students at the Freedom School would examine why the boycotts took place, how segregation in the South and the North were similar, and how they experienced racism in places like New York. The outline also shows her insistence that northerners recognize and examine racism on their home terrain, not only in the Jim Crow South.
The Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools included several New York City civil rights organizations. They produced this flier to recruit participants for the February 3, 1964 boycott. They used different kinds of text and a photograph to make their argument that a boycott was important and necessary.
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.
On October 28, 1958, in two separate cases, the Board of Education charged the “Harlem Nine” parents with violating the state law requiring parents to send their children to school. Judge Nathaniel Kaplan was the presiding family court judge in the case involving four of the parents. He found them guilty of violating the law.1 But less than two weeks later, two of the parents had their case heard by a different judge. Judge Justine Polier dismissed the charges against the parents in her courtroom.
In 1958, one year after nine Black students made national and international news when they desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregation activists in Harlem organized their own protest. Nine mothers in Harlem decided to keep their children out of local junior high schools to protest both segregation and the conditions in those schools. They knew that their children’s schools had poorer facilities, a more limited curriculum, and more unlicensed teachers than the city’s segregated white schools. The press called these parents the “Harlem Nine,” echoing how the Little Rock students had been called the “Little Rock Nine.”1
Harlem residents like Ella Baker and Mae Mallory, alongside other parents and community members in Brooklyn and in Jamaica, Queens, pushed the New York City Board of Education to integrate their schools. They gathered information about conditions in schools serving Black and Latinx students, and conducted “street meetings” where parents and interested community members could talk with each other about their concerns.
In its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional because separate schools for Black children were “inherently unequal.” Citing the work of Black psychologist and City College professor Kenneth Clark, among others, the court argued that segregated schools were unconstitutional because segregation taught a message of racial superiority for white students and racial inferiority for Black students.1
Parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities were often told to send their children to a state residential school if their IQ scores were low. Schools could set a cut-off for IQ scores and then exclude children with scores below that cut-off from public special education classes.1 Some families who had the financial means chose to keep their children at home, but still wanted them to be educated. One such parent, Ann Greenberg, placed a classified ad in the New York Post, looking for parents interested in starting their own day program for children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Her advertisement (and others like this billboard) eventually attracted hundreds of people looking for similar support for their children.2
The document above comes from a publication printed by the NAACP’s New York City Youth Council called The Challenge. Starting in 1935, the NAACP organized youth councils, originally composed of young people ages nineteen to twenty-five. Over time, more high school students joined youth councils and junior youth councils were created for students thirteen and under. Youth councils throughout the country took part in demonstrations and even started their own. Ella Baker, who worked with young people through the NAACP in a variety of ways, was one of the adults who worked with the New York City NAACP’s Youth Council. Adult leaders like Ella Baker supported young people as they determined the issues that were important to them and helped bring their ideas to the broader public. This issue of The Challenge illustrates how students crafted their own voice in challenging segregation and other issues relevant to their lives.
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.
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
Scholar W.E.B. DuBois was an editor of The Crisis, a magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP). DuBois wrote a short editorial in the magazine, responding to claims that intelligence test scores showed Black people to be less intelligent than white people.
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.
Polio was a mass-disabling event that spanned nearly 50 years between the time the virus appeared in 1908 to the discovery of a vaccine in 1955. Most people who caught polio became sick, but many people died and many others became partially or totally paralyzed. Children were especially likely to catch the virus because their immune systems were less developed. In New York City, a major outbreak took place in 1916, killing more than 2,000 people and disabling thousands more. Many children who survived polio were cared for at home or lived at hospitals.
Raised type was first invented in France in 1824, by Louis Braille. He became blind after an injury as a young child. He later learned of a cryptography system developed by an army officer for communication at night. He used that knowledge to develop a raised type system for blind readers. His system later became the official standard for publishing for the blind in France, and was also adopted and modified for English by British educators.
