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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.