On February 3, 1964, an estimated 464,400 students - almost half the city’s enrollment - boycotted New York City’s segregated school system. Getting that many people to stay out of school and walk on picket lines in front of schools, all peacefully, required a great deal of work. So did organizing Freedom Schools, where children who were out of school could be safe, have meals, and learn.
Here a black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, reflects on how others spoke about the February 3 boycott both before and after it happened. They comment on how a white newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, had covered the boycott. Other white newspapers, including The New York Times, had been very critical of the boycott before it happened.
On the day of the February 3 boycott, some participants gathered at the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, where they marched and picketed. Later they decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. This silent film footage, an excerpt of one of several reels taken that day by the New York Police Department, captures the participants and their posters and slogans. Although the footage doesn’t have sound, it still captures the atmosphere of the day.
The second school boycott took place on March 16, 1964. Although fewer people participated in the second boycott than the first, protests against the city’s segregated and unequal school systems remained strong. Black New Yorkers held different opinions on the source of oppression and how to respond to it. The organizers of the boycotts, for instance, believed that school integration provided a way to move towards a more equal society. Some, like Malcolm X, supported Black nationalism, which promoted economic self-sufficiency, pride in Black identity, and the formation of an independent nation. However, despite these differing views, Malcolm X took part in the second boycott, and he describes why he participated in this interview.
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.
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. Black and Puerto Rican students who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, would be bused to a few schools in the Glendale-Ridgewood area of Queens, where the schools were all-white. Parents, and particularly white mothers, organized this protest.
During the “Harlem Nine”’s struggle to integrate schools in New York City, multiple newspapers, including The New York Times and Amsterdam News, published photographs of Mae Mallory with her daughter Patricia. These images accompanied articles about the legal struggles of Mallory and the other Harlem mothers who had been charged with violating the state’s compulsory education law when they kept their children out of school. In some ways, she and her daughter became the face of the “Harlem Nine.”
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
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more. She pushed for freedom. Baker saw the pursuit of liberation as a collective effort, and she valued the views and passions of young people. As historian Barbara Ransby put it in her biography on Ella Baker, Baker believed “people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out…Baker’s pedagogy was democratic and reciprocal…her view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base.”1
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, educators and social reformers created institutions for people they called “idiots,” “feeble minded,” or later, “mentally retarded.”1 They said that these facilities could train children and return them to society as productive citizens, and relieve the few overcrowded and understaffed “special classes” in city schools. State institutions like Letchworth Village were built to take on the responsibility of educating children outside of New York City.
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed. The difference of a few points on a single test could mean placement or exclusion from a regular class with academic instruction. CRMD classes - or classes for “children with retarded mental development” as they were called by the Board of Education - had much lower expectations for students and too frequently had teachers who were not trained to support students with intellectual and other disabilities.1
A school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities opened on Randall’s Island in the East River in the 1860s - alongside the city’s almshouse, hospitals, and prisons. By the early 1900s, the school had been renamed the “Custodial Asylum and School for the Feeble-Minded.”1 At the time, the term “feeble minded” was a label used by educators, doctors, and government officials to indicate that a person had an intellectual disability. Intelligence tests were an important, if not the only, factor in deciding whether a person would be labeled “feeble minded.”
Photography has an important place in African American history. When racist practices and beliefs denied Black people’s dignity and humanity, Black individuals and families with the means to do so could go to a photography studio and present themselves as they wanted the world to see them. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery, used photography to spread the powerful image of himself that he wanted the world to see and recognize. Douglass made himself the most photographed person in the US in the 19th century, in a time when cameras were large, cumbersome, and expensive, and could be accessed only by going to a photography studio.1
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. This legislation was regularly referred to as the “Elsberg Bill” because state Senator Nathaniel Elsberg introduced the bill. This Brooklyn Daily Eagle story narrates the events leading up to the bill’s passage, different responses after its signing, and the response of Mrs. Cisco’s attorney George Wallace.
After a few years of pushing for desegregation of the local Jamaica schools, Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco brought suit against the school board of Queens for violating the state’s education law. Previously, she and her husband Samuel Cisco had worked together, but Mr. Cisco passed away in 1897. Mrs. Cisco carried their work forward, alongside her attorneys.1
Samuel B. Cisco, a Black man, lived in Jamaica, in Queens County. At the time of this newspaper article, in 1896, Queens was not yet part of New York City, and Jamaica was a small town surrounded by a rural landscape. Mr. Cisco ran a successful scavenger business. He and his wife Elizabeth had six children.1 Although Mrs. Cisco is less visible in the article, she worked alongside her husband and continued their fight for years after his passing.
