Judith (Judy) Heumann was one of tens of thousands of children who contracted polio during outbreaks in the late 1940s and early 1950s and became physically disabled.
In the fall of 1964, months after the massive February 1964 boycott, Reverend Milton Galamison and the Citywide Committee on Integration launched another boycott.
Reverend Milton Galamison was the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and a key figure in the struggle to desegregate New York City’s schools.
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.
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.