The Will and the Way of the Boycotters
On February 3, 1964, an estimated 464,400 students - almost half the city’s enrollment - boycotted New York City’s segregated school system.
parent activism
What a “Fizzle!”
Here a black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, reflects on how others spoke about the February 3 boycott both before and after it happened.
Freedom Day March on Film
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.
Malcolm X Comments on the Boycotts
The second school boycott took place on March 16, 1964.
School Boycott!
The Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools included several New York City civil rights organizations.
A Boycott Solves Nothing
The New York Times’ editorial board published this editorial a few days before the first 1964 school boycott.
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.
Mae Mallory and her daughter Patricia
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.
In the matter of Charlene Skipwith, excerpt
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.
“We’d Rather Go to Jail.”
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.
Jansen Must Go!
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.
Check Your School!
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more.
We Kept Our Retarded Child At Home, excerpt
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.
Your Child and Willowbrook, excerpt
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.
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.
The Feeble Minded in New York, excerpts
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.
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.