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Key Concepts for Teaching

Key Concepts for Teaching

The New York City Civil Rights Project emphasizes that education has been a central site of struggle for civil rights in the US. We want to ensure that often-overlooked struggles for disability rights are included in civil rights history, and that struggles for disability rights by Disabled people of color are not further erased or marginalized. People of color and Disabled people have used the courts, mass protest, and many other strategies to win recognition of their rights in the law. We want to recognize that women and young people of color were civil rights leaders and should be central to how we think about civil rights history.

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (or IDEA) (1975), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) were crucial steps in naming and protecting the rights of students of color and Disabled students. Even if each of the civil rights recognized in these decisions and laws were always respected, injustices could still continue.

“Justice” is a broader, more ambitious, word than “rights.” It includes but looks beyond rights to consider people’s humanity, their dreams, their aspirations, and their power to shape their own lives. Working for justice involves solidarity, support, and connections within and across communities. Sins Invalid, a disability justice organization led by Disabled people of color, says that “This is disability justice”: “All bodies are unique and essential. All bodies are whole. All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them. We move together, with no body left behind.” The NYC Coalition for Educational Justice states that “Students deserve a quality public education that honors their cultures, backgrounds, and communities.” We are motivated by these and other historic visions of justice.

We believe students can better understand their city and schools, and expand their own power to make changes in our world, when they have a robust understanding of the history of fights for educational justice in NYC.

We carefully selected the primary sources included in this website to reflect recent historical research about racism, disability, and education in New York City. The primary sources here help teach a set of key concepts we list and explain below.

Yet we recognize that these sources represent only a fragment of the full histories of race and disability within NYC schools. Many important topics and stories have yet to be included. We hope that our resources inspire teachers and students to learn more, and that this website serves as a starting point. As historical interpretations are always changing, revised through new evidence, observations, and insights, we ask you to think of this site as work always in progress.

Throughout this site, we use terms such as “disability” and “race” inclusively. This means that when we identify people by a racial category—such as Black or white, for example—that category encompasses all people within that category, including Disabled and non-disabled people, people of different genders and sexualities, and other markers of identity. Likewise, when we speak of Disabled people, this includes people of a variety of racial categories, genders, sexualities, and more.

1. Black and Latina women (and those in solidarity with them) have led many struggles for educational justice in New York City. They have done so through a range of strategies and toward a range of goals and visions for education, from survival and citizenship to freedom and liberation.

Black people in the US always pursued education. They did so even when it was dangerous or illegal, because of laws prohibiting education for Black people, or because of threats of white violence. Both during and after slavery, Black adults met in churches, inside homes, or in other hidden spaces, to teach each other and their children.1 They built schools when governments refused to. Black people, including those living in poverty, committed their time, labor, and resources to education. They did so out of the belief that learning was a route to freedom, citizenship, and living their full humanity, even when the nation and its white majority tried to deny them all of these things.2

Black and Latina women New Yorkers made themselves part of this long tradition of struggle to secure education. For example, Black women founded schools for Black children in Brooklyn throughout the 1800s.3 They challenged legal segregation in New York State in the 1890s.4 They lobbied and organized to get access to education for Disabled people in the 1960s and 70s.5 Black women worked as mothers, teachers, and community advocates for a better education for their children. As New York’s Puerto Rican community grew over the 20th century, Latinas worked in solidarity with Black women, while leading their own educational justice struggles as well.6

Black and Latinx communities continued to define and redefine what they imagined just and liberatory education to be. They fought for more Black history and ethnic studies. They wanted the city to hire more educators of color. They demanded equal educational funding and pushed for power to make decisions about their children’s schools.7 Parents resisted segregation by race, including when the educational system used disability labels to segregate students of color.8 To fight against inequalities and bring their visions of education into reality, activists went to court, gathered in study groups, created institutions, blocked streets, and organized boycotts.

Black women activists and Latina activists played major roles in securing important improvements in education in New York City. However, gains have often fallen short of activists’ goals for a humane and just education, or have been rolled back over time.9

While we recognize that Black men and Latinos - as attorneys, ministers, educators, and fathers - contributed enormously to fights for a better education in New York City, Black and Latina women’s contributions to civil rights organizing are often overlooked.10 Therefore, we highlight them here.

Suggested Primary source: Elizabeth Cisco

2. Disabled people and their parents (and those in solidarity with them) have led many struggles for educational justice in New York City. They have done so through a range of strategies and toward a range of goals and visions for education, including survival, citizenship, inclusion, and self-determination.

Disabled students, parents, and advocates always fought for access to education. They did so long before the educational rights of Disabled children were recognized by law. Their efforts included parents creating their own schools, developing organizations, protesting inhumane treatment in state institutions, fighting for public school programs to serve their children’s needs, and bringing court cases.11 Disabled students also organized campaigns for access to buildings, communication, and information they needed to learn.12 They made spaces for their own learning, joy, and connection, as well.13

Some of the first schools in NYC for students with disabilities were those for the Deaf (1817) or blind (1832). These opened when public schooling for white non-disabled students was expanding rapidly across the city. These schools were funded mainly through philanthropy and tuition paid by families. Educators developed specific techniques helpful in educating both Deaf and blind students. But other teaching techniques harmed Disabled students, such as pushing for a certain raised point type (which was more difficult for blind students to read than braille), and forcing oralism onto Deaf students—a method that rejected sign language in favor of learning language only through lip-reading and verbal speech. The first school for “idiots,” a term that at the time likely included people with a variety of disabilities, was founded in 1866. It was located on Randall’s Island, and was funded through a mix of state funding and private tuition.14

Starting in 1884, New York state passed “compulsory education” laws requiring more students to attend school, and for more years. However, schools could still legally reject students with certain disabilities until 1975.15 Some parents and advocates fought this exclusion by starting their own schools and programs, while lobbying state and federal government for access to a free public education for their children.

While Disabled people and their allies had worked to expand education in a variety of ways for over a century, disability rights activism grew significantly during the 1960s and thereafter. The civil rights movement of Black Americans inspired other groups with a shared identity—such as women, queer people, and Disabled people —to forge their own.16 Disabled people fought for recognition that disability was an integral part of human diversity. Moreover, they sought legal recognition of their rights and acknowledgment of discrimination faced in a range of venues, including employment, housing, transportation, and education.17 Their activism helped bring about the first federal legislation for disability rights within education - the “Education for All Handicapped Children Act’’ of 1975, later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.18 Activists called attention to how physical spaces, communication systems, and social interactions created barriers for Disabled people. Following the passage of Section 504 in 1973, which banned discrimination against Disabled people by federally funded institutions, activists helped create new standards for public accommodations, transportation, and communication which became codified into law as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.19

Disabled people and their advocates have secured important access to and supports in education, but these accomplishments have often fallen short of their goals for humane and just education. Many victories by activists have required continued activism to sustain over time.

Suggested Primary source: S.O. F.E.D. U.P. Handbook for the Disabled Students of Brooklyn College, CUNY

3. Disability and race are both social categories. They have developed in connection with each other over time. People in power have shaped these categories to serve their own interests.

Race is a social category. It has no basis in biology. Racial categories, like “white,” “Black,” or “Asian,” are malleable, meaning that have changed over time, and people in different societies have defined them differently. People in our society have decided what racial categories are, who fits within them, and who sits above or below in a racial hierarchy. People with economic, political, and social power have shaped racial categories to suit their own interests, including their desire to exercise control over other people’s labor, land, resources, or citizenship. In the United States, white supremacy and anti-blackness, operating in the contexts of settler colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, have been central to the making of racial categories.20

For some readers, it might be hard to think about disability as a social category. It is helpful first to think of human differences often labeled as disabled as simply that: human differences. They are an integral part of human life. Then, we should think about the crucial question of how people and societies respond to those differences. What do people think of as a “normal” body or a “normal” mind? What human variations or differences are thought of as outside of “normal,” or are thought of as “disabled”? By answering these questions - in different ways in different societies and at different points in time - people have created the social category of disability.21 People’s ideas about what is “normal,” and what the consequences are for having a body or mind different than “normal,” has been shaped by white supremacy, misogyny, and heteronormativity as they have existed in the US within the contexts of slavery, capitalism, and empire.22

Categories of disability and race have developed together over time. Ideas about ability and disability have often been part of defining racial categories, and vice versa.23 Think of how some stereotypes portray Black people as unusually athletically capable, while the others claim Asian students are academically more competent than others. Sometimes language also relates to ideas of race and disability, as when a student’s use of Spanish leads others to identify them as outside of “normal” communication or intelligence, or assume their racial identity indicates the language they speak.24

Disability can also be a consequence of racism. Locating polluting factories or toxic waste facilities close to where Black and Latinx children live, limiting their access to quality schooling or health care, or making only physically dangerous work available to Black and Latinx workers, can disable people in those communities.25

Social categories have always had powerful consequences in people’s lives, ranging from enslavement, confinement, exclusion, and death, to privilege, opportunity, community, and life. Racial and disability categories have been used to determine whether a person in the US could be a citizen or not, vote or not, attend school or not, have a job or not, marry or not, travel or not. People of color and Disabled people have historically faced poverty, incarceration, and police violence at rates higher than white and non-disabled people.26

While social categories can be used in a destructive manner, they can also be used in affirming and constructive ways. For example, Disabled people fought for recognition of disability as a protected category to help them secure their rights. Disability categories help establish Disabled people’s access to health, personal care, and other services, including accommodations in education.27 People often come together within social categories - like Blackness or Latinidad, or disability, or Deafness, as examples - to form supportive communities, celebrate their identities, share pride, and fight together for justice.28

Finally, it is crucial to remember that all people simultaneously occupy multiple social categories, creating intersectional experiences. Black people, for example, are Disabled or non-disabled, and of any gender identity. A white person may be cis, trans, or queer. People’s experiences of one identity category are inevitably shaped by others that they also inhabit.29 Disabled people of color have long fought to have their lives and unique experiences recognized and understood, fighting against policies and political movements that focus on one identity category to the exclusion or erasure of the other.30

Suggested Primary source: S.O. F.E.D. U.P. Handbook for the Disabled Students of Brooklyn College, CUNY

4. Racism and ableism have worked together to produce segregated schools in New York City.

Who goes to school where in NYC? This important question has been answered in a variety of ways over time. One continuous pattern, though, is that racism and ableism have shaped who has access to schools, where they are educated, and what type of schooling they receive. New York built more and more public schools throughout the 1800s, yet Disabled students remained largely excluded from public schooling. Furthermore, Black students were assigned only to segregated Black schools with fewer resources than segregated white schools. Although New York State ended legal segregation in its schools by race in 1900, a variety of policies continued to racially segregate students and wholly exclude most Disabled students from schooling.31

Historically, racism and ableism have worked together in harmful ways toward students of color, and especially Black and Latinx Disabled students. In the present, policies and practices allow educators to use disability to segregate schools (or classrooms, or programs within schools) by race. For example, Black and Latinx students frequently receive disability labels and are assigned to “special education” classes while more White and Asian students are placed in honors classes, and given the label of “gifted and talented.” Students with similar needs and behaviors have often been classified differently depending upon their race - with more white students being identified with autism while Black students receive “behavior disorder” labels, for example.32

Suggested Primary source: “600” Schools, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

5. Disability takes many forms. Disabled students in NYC have had, and continue to have, a wide variety of educational experiences.

Because the term disability describes those who do not fit social ideas of “normal,” it encompasses a wide variety of experiences. These include mental health disabilities; chronic diseases; and sensory, developmental, cognitive, physical, and learning disabilities.33

Schooling has been a place of contrasting experiences for students with disabilities. For some, it has meant support and learning, even liberation and joy at times. It has also been a place of oppression and confinement.34 Students of color and poor students experience disability in school differently than do their white or wealthier peers. They receive different special education categorizations and are more likely to be placed in more restrictive and segregated environments.35

Even when experiencing oppression in schools—as when Deaf students were prohibited from using sign language to communicate with each other at NYC Schools through most of the twentieth century—Disabled young people sought ways to connect with one another inside and outside of school, for their own pleasure and community building.36

Suggested Primary source: Interview with Thomas Samuels

6. Segregation contributes to educational inequality in New York City.

Segregation means setting one group or category of people physically apart from others. Segregation can happen across large or small spaces. Segregation on a large scale, for example, includes a housing development occupied only by Black or white people, or a section of town occupied only by Latinx people. Segregation on a small scale, for example, can be when Disabled students are in one classroom and non-disabled students are in another within the same school.

Segregation is one way that people in powerful positions have used their power for their own interests. Throughout NYC’s history, white, wealthier, and non-disabled people have created and maintained segregation to concentrate resources and opportunity in the hands of white, wealthier, and non-disabled students while denying them to students of color, Disabled students, and poor students.37 This inequality takes a wide range of forms, including access to classroom materials, safe and secure school buildings, and enrichment opportunities by highly skilled teachers. This inequality is often most severe for people who experience segregation by both race and disability.38

For Disabled students, needed services and resources are often only available in segregated spaces. Specific accommodations or supports may only be available in schools or classrooms away from students’ non-disabled peers. While disability law calls for Disabled students to spend as much time as possible with non-disabled peers, many special education programs involve pulling students out of class, or even moving from one school to another, for their education and accommodations. 39

Some activists for educational justice in NYC have always been concerned that segregation denies students opportunities to get to know one another and learn together across different life experiences. Most educational justice activists agree that, in the context of racism and ableism, school segregation has contributed to unequal educational resources and opportunities. Historically marginalized people not only experience segregation and inequality as a lack of needed resources, but also as a lack of power to determine what happens within segregated spaces.40

Despite these challenges linked to segregation, some Black and Latinx communities and some disability communities have created strong schools and/or learning spaces for themselves.41

7. Segregation and inequality are not natural phenomena. They are the result of human actions and choices.

School segregation by race and ability in New York City results from a wide range of policy decisions including, but not limited to, school zoning, construction, architecture, admissions, disability labeling, testing, transportation, and curriculum content.42 Legacies of historic racism, including housing segregation and wealth inequality, shape present-day segregation as well.43

In the late 1800s, Black New Yorkers lived in many areas of the city and often in close proximity to white residents. Disabled young people primarily lived with their families throughout the city. Over the first half of the 1900s, public policy and housing markets made American cities including NYC more and more racially segregated in terms of where people lived. Residential zoning, subsidized suburban development and home finance, public housing construction, and highway construction, as well as segregating real estate market practices and individual racism, made residential areas very segregated by race.44 Disabled people who lived with their families at home experienced this landscape of racial segregation. Yet, during this time, more and more Disabled people lived in the growing network of state institutions, effectively segregated from non-disabled people.45 Segregation in many forms was increasing during these years.

By 1900, New York schools no longer labeled schools as for Black students or white students only, but the Board of Education made zoning, construction, and other decisions that ensured that some schools would have mostly or only white students and some schools would have mostly or only Black (and, once they began to arrive in New York in larger numbers in the 1940s) Puerto Rican students.46

Simultaneously, the Board of Education was creating new classes and schools for Disabled children or children they identified as disabled. They created new disability categories like “social maladjustment,” with their own classes and, in some cases, separate schools. Educators and the courts placed Black and Puerto Rican boys in this category more frequently than they did white boys.47 Other children with intellectual disabilities were excluded from schools entirely, and students with physical disabilities often faced architectural barriers preventing them from attending their local neighborhood schools with their friends and neighbors.

Thousands of large and small decisions by educators, teachers, judges, and others shaped New York’s segregated school system. These decisions included where the city chose to build schools, draw school zone and district lines, assign students to schools, assign teachers to schools, admit or reject students based on ability or disability categories, and fund schools and specialized programs. When people speak about segregation as “just the way it is” they are choosing not to recognize this history of policies and choices that created unequal spaces in NYC schools according to race and disability.

Suggested Primary source: Wadleigh’s School Zone

8. New York City never desegregated its schools.

Black New Yorkers protested the segregation of their schools throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation by race violated the US Constitution.48 The New York City Board of Education talked a lot about racial desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s but made few actual changes, even after major activism by Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers and those working in solidarity with them.49

Segregation or exclusion of Disabled students continued as well. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown did not mention Disabled students, but the case paved the way for the courts to recognize the rights of Disabled students several decades later.50 Legal recognition of these rights helped increase Disabled students access to schooling, but many policies and practices in special education continued to segregate students in and between schools.51

Since 1970, New York has operated District 75, a separate school district only for Disabled students. Like many special education programs within schools or classrooms, this district is predominantly Black and Latinx students, illustrating continued segregation in terms of race and ability.52 Six decades after Brown, a team of researchers identified New York State’s schools as the most racially segregated in the country, and NYC one of the most segregated districts.53

9. Historically marginalized communities seek self-determination in education, and have created their own schools, spaces, and institutions to achieve this goal.

Imagine an all-Black youth club, or a school for Deaf children led by Deaf educators. Are these examples of segregated institutions?

Students of color and Disabled students and their advocates were often denied the opportunity to exercise power or control in white-dominated schools and those built for non-disabled students. One way they have responded was to create their own schools or other places for learning that reflected their self-determination, that is, their ability to shape and guide themselves and their own institutions. These spaces reflected a desire for being together, giving support, and taking strength from one another, because of, or in spite of, racism and ableism in the broader society.54

Because these institutions are created within historically marginalized communities, and because people choose to join them - rather than being required by others to do so - we do not apply the term “segregated” to these spaces.

10. Racism and segregation in education are national - not only southern - realities.

While many accounts of Jim Crow segregation focus on the South, segregation was, and is, a northern reality too. It has been convenient for white New Yorkers to focus on racism elsewhere, and to think of themselves as innocent or free of connection to histories of slavery, segregation, and racism. But that is not what historical evidence shows.55

People of African descent were enslaved in New York and elsewhere in the North. Slavery, which disabled many people through violence, overwork, and neglect, did not end in New York State until 1827.56 The New York State Constitution allowed school districts to operate separate segregated schools designated for Black or white students until 1900.57

Jim Crow was a system of legal and extralegal violence designed to terrorize, oppress, and control Black people politically, economically, and socially. Even before Jim Crow developed in the South in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, white northerners developed laws and policies that segregated schools, housing, and employment. For example, white New Yorkers restricted Black New Yorkers to living in some portions of the city (where they were more likely to experience disabling environmental conditions) and to work primarily in lower-paid and often physically demanding jobs (where they were more likely to be injured and become disabled). In addition, Black New Yorkers faced violent treatment at the hands of the New York City police. Until the 1950s people of color in New York had limited power to influence their city through electoral politics.58 The city government favored white neighborhoods with better services in education, health, sanitation, and transportation. These forms of state-sanctioned structural discrimination and violence exemplified the “Jim Crow North.”

The history of institutional and structural racism in housing, employment, wealth, poverty, incarceration, and opportunity shape NYC to this day. So do present-day racist and ableist policy choices.

Suggested Primary source: Change the Status Crow

11. How New Yorkers talk about schools, especially white and liberal and non-disabled New Yorkers, has justified and obscured rather than challenged segregation.

Language can be a way of preserving segregation and resisting desegregation. Many policy choices have created segregation in housing and schooling in New York. But talk about what the “good” schools are, who the “good” kids are, or how families in “better” neighborhoods deserve “better” schools, are subtle ways to speak about racial segregation as if it just happens naturally, instead of looking at policy choices that support segregation. Many people who say they support desegregation or oppose racism still speak and think these ways.59

Some of New York’s most powerful white liberal organizations - like The New York Times, for example - used their voices against civil rights activism. They supported an unjust status quo and saved their criticism for those who sought to challenge it.60

Moreover, explicit racist and ableist ideas and terms blame individuals and their communities - rather than policies and people in power - for segregation and inequality. In the 1960s and afterwards, some educators and policymakers spoke of “cultural pathology” or “cultural deprivation” in Black and Latinx communities. They labeled Black and Latinx boys as “socially maladjusted,” instead of noticing how schools were not serving these students well.61

Likewise, ableism can also seem to justify segregation. Some people, including some educators, claim that it is just common sense to separate students based on their disability status or special education label. Oftentimes advocates seeking supports for Disabled students in courts or in policy feel like they have to emphasize how Disabled students are different from their peers, rather than emphasizing what students have in common.62

NYC no longer officially segregates students by racial category, but it does still segregate many students by disability category, placing them in different classrooms in schools, different programs in school buildings, or even in the separate District 75 - which is a district for students with disabilities, and which has many more Black and Latinx boys than their proportion in the city overall. Through segregation of various forms, students with disabilities are often excluded from important parts of schooling, like athletics, assemblies, and various events.63

Why is segregation by disability category seemingly acceptable policy in NYC today, when segregation by racial category is (at least as official policy) not acceptable?

12. Histories of racism, ableism, and activism are relevant to all students.

Students of all backgrounds and abilities are growing up in a city and a school system shaped by racism and ableism from the past unto the present. Students can better understand their city and their schools if they understand that race and disability are social categories and know how people in their city have constructed educational inequality. The history of ongoing, varied activism for justice in education can illustrate for students the ways that New Yorkers sought to make change in their city and their world. These histories can help all New York City students know that, as one of the NYCCRHP team members Judy DeRosier put it, “they are worthy, and people fought for them.”

13. Injustice and inequality in education continue to this day.

New York’s students have a right to a “sound, basic education” guaranteed them by the state constitution.64 (Although the US constitution prohibits discrimination in education based on race or ability, it does not provide a right to education. It leaves that to the states). Despite the fact that each student has a recognized right to education free from discrimination based on race or gender, the reality of schooling in NYC is far from equal. Disabled students and students of color are more likely to attend schools with lower levels of academic achievement and safety, and fewer academic opportunities, than white students and non-disabled students. 65

The Supreme Court began to recognize Disabled people’s rights to education with the 1975 “Education of All Handicapped Children” Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.66 These legal structures created a way for Disabled children and their families to claim access and services that had previously been denied to them. Although disability rights law today emphasizes placing students in the “least restrictive environment” that can provide the services they are entitled to, tens of thousands of NYC students do not attend school alongside non-disabled peers and experience dehumanizing treatment in segregated or inclusive classroom settings. Disabled students, especially those who are Black and Latinx, are suspended and expelled from school at much higher rates than their white and non-disabled peers.67

These continuing inequalities make it clear that even if the law recognizes students’ educational rights, NYC students, and in particular Disabled and Black and Latinx students, do not yet fully experience educational justice.

14. Activism for educational justice for and by students of color and Disabled students is underway today. It is as important in the present as it has been in the past.

Disabled students, students of color, and their advocates have secured access to public education, but New York City students today do not experience educational justice. Multiple forms of segregation continue to exist, requiring ongoing scrutiny and activism. Parents and students advocate for themselves daily. Groups like IntegrateNYC and Teens Take Charge, led by students, and NYC Alliance for School Integration and Desegregation, led by parents, are still fighting for a more just education system and against racial segregation. Parents work together in local organizations like the New Settlement Parent Action Committee and in city- and state-wide organizations like the Alliance for Quality Education. Youth organizations like the Urban Youth Collaborative fight against policing and discipline practices that target students of color and Disabled students.

Most New York City public schools remain off limits to students with mobility disabilities because of architectural barriers68 and many students face challenges with transportation to school.69 Today, many Disabled students learn in separate classes or in specialized schools attended only by other Disabled students.70 While “mainstreaming” and “inclusion” are often publicly stated as the Department of Education’s goal for students with disabilities, some students never have the chance to learn alongside their peers. Resources and supports they need may be available only in separate schools or classes. Selective admission screens as well as flawed or biased assessments keep students from gaining access to certain classrooms.

Parents of Disabled children advocate on their behalf from an early age. The Arise Coalition fights for physical access to buildings, and Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST NYC) organizes to improve bus service for Disabled students. Other parent groups like AHRC, and IncludeNYC, and legal groups like Advocates For Children continue the struggle for adequately funded learning supports, inclusion of Disabled students in classrooms, and preparation for inclusion in society as adults.

While there are currently no student-led organizations focused specifically on disability in K-12 education that we are aware of, some individuals have spoken out about divisive screening practices.71 Groups like the Student Organization for Every Disability United for Progress (S.O.F.E.D.U.P) at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities fight for greater funding to ensure all forms of access to higher education.

  1. Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American History in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); James D. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). ↩︎

  2. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South; Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). ↩︎

  3. Baumgartner, In the Pursuit of Knowledge. ↩︎

  4. Elizabeth Cisco; Zoë Burkholder, An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). ↩︎

  5. Willie Mae Goodman; “Our History - AHRC New York," accessed February 9, 2023, https://www.ahrcnyc.org/about/history/. ↩︎

  6. Evelina Antonetty ↩︎

  7. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell, Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). ↩︎

  8. Evelina Antonetty ↩︎

  9. Erickson and Morrell, Educating Harlem; Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). ↩︎

  10. Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History. ↩︎

  11. See, for example: “Our History - AHRC New York,” accessed February 9, 2023, https://www.ahrcnyc.org/about/history/; Kimberly E. Kode, Elizabeth Farrell and the History of Special Education (Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children, 2002), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED474364; Jorge Matos Valldejuli, “The Racialized History of Disability Activism from ‘The Willowbrooks of this World,’” The Activist History Review, November 4, 2019, https://activisthistory.com/2019/11/04/the-racialized-history-of-disability-activism-from-the-willowbrooks-of-this-world1/; “Litigation: Jose P. v. Mills,” Advocates for Children of New York, accessed January 22, 2023, https://www.advocatesforchildren.org/litigation/class_actions/jose_p_vs_mills; Francine Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools and the Legacy of Segregation in Special Education,” The Gotham Center for New York City History, June 21, 2022, https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/new-york-city-600-schools-and-the-legacy-of-segregation-in-special-education. The history of disability rights activism in education in New York City needs much more study. ↩︎

  12. S.O. F.E.D. U.P. Handbook for the Disabled Students of Brooklyn College, CUNY ↩︎

  13. Brianna DiGiovanni, “Deaf New York City Spaces,” ArcGIS StoryMaps, October 19, 2020, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/32b9eaed718947d9b647447830b41cbc. ↩︎

  14. Margret A. Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993). ↩︎

  15. Edwin W. Martin, Reed Martin, and Donna L. Terman, “The Legislative and Litigation History of Special Education,” The Future of Children 6, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 25-39. ↩︎

  16. Keith A. Mayes, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023). ↩︎

  17. Crip Camp, directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham (2020; Rock Hill, NY: James Lebrecht, Nicole Newnham, and Sara Bolder), netflix.com; Doris Zames Fleisher and Freida Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Fred Pelka, What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). ↩︎

  18. Jeffrey J. Zettel and Joseph Ballard, “The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 PL 94-142: Its History, Origins, and Concepts,” Journal of Education 161, no. 3 (1979): 5-22; Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics From Johnson to Reagan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). ↩︎

  19. Jonathan M. Young, Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans With Disabilities Act (National Council on Disability, 2010). ↩︎

  20. Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); California Newsreel, the Othering & Belonging Institute, the U.C. Berkeley Library, and the American Cultures Center at U.C. Berkeley; “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” Race: The Power of an Illusion, 2019 https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/. ↩︎

  21. David J. Connor and Jan Valle, “Rescripting Crips: Reclaiming Disability History from a Disability Studies Perspective within Public School Curriculum,” in Kulture-Geschichte-Behinderug (Culture, History, Disability), ed. O. Musenberg (Humboldt University Press, 2017), 201-220; Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri, “Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCri): Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/ability,” Race, Ethnicity and Education, 16, no. 1 (2013), 1-31, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511 ↩︎

  22. Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); Annamma, Connor, and Ferri, “Dis/ability Critical Race Studies”; Sami Schalk, Body/Minds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Jennifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021). ↩︎

  23. Schalk, Black Disability Politics; Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2022). ↩︎

  24. Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Jennifer Phuong and María Cioè-Peña, “Perfect or Mocha: Language Policing and Pathologization,” in DisCrit Expanded: Reverberations, Ruptures, and Inquiries, ed. Subini Annamma, Beth A. Ferri, and David J. Connor (New York: Teachers College Press, 2022), 129-144. ↩︎

  25. Rabia Belt, “The Fat Prisoner’s Dilemma: Slow Violence, Intersectionality, and a Disability Rights Framework for the Future,” Georgetown Law Journal 110, no. 4 (2022): 785-833. ↩︎

  26. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States; Lydia X. M. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu (eds.), All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (Lincoln, NE: Dragonbee Press, 2017). ↩︎

  27. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States. ↩︎

  28. Schalk, Black Disability Politics; Crip Camp, directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham. ↩︎

  29. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241-1299, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039; Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/. ↩︎

  30. Brown et al., All the Weight of Our Dreams. ↩︎

  31. Mayes, The Unteachables; Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools.” ↩︎

  32. Cheri Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City: Understanding the Landscape,” The Research Alliance for New York City Schools at NYU Steinhardt, 2019, https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2021-03/Special_Education_in_New_York_City_final.pdf; Beth A. Ferri and David J. Connor, Reading Resistance: Discourses of Exclusion in Desegregation & Inclusion Debates (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). ↩︎

  33. Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: a Disability Justice Primer (Berkeley, CA: Sins Invalid, 2019); Emily Ladau, Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2021). ↩︎

  34. Margaret Price, “Education,” in Keywords in Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 64-67, https://keywords.nyupress.org/disability-studies/. ↩︎

  35. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City. ↩︎

  36. S.O. F.E.D. U.P. Handbook for the Disabled Students of Brooklyn College, CUNY Deaf Social Spaces ↩︎

  37. Christopher Bonastia, The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2022); Kimberly Johnson, “Wadleigh High School: The Price of Segregation” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (Columbia University Press, 2019), 77-100, https://ansleyerickson.github.io/book/chapters/03/; Mark Winston-Griffith and Max Friedman, Season 1, 2019, in School Colors, produced by Brooklyn Deep, podcast, https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn. ↩︎

  38. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City; Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools.”; Emily B. Clark, “Deserving to Belong: Complex Narratives of Working and Learning in Self-Contained Spaces” (Ph.D diss, CUNY Graduate Center, 2021); José P. v. Mills, https://www.advocatesforchildren.org/litigation/class_actions/jose_p_vs_mills; Lora v. Board of Educ. of City of New York, 587 F. Supp. 1572 (E.D.N.Y. 1984. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/587/1572/1752714/.; James Haskins, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher (New York: Grove Press, 1969). ↩︎

  39. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 1990, https://sites.ed.gov/idea/statute-chapter-33/subchapter-ii/1412/a/5. ↩︎

  40. Marta Gutman, “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” and Russell Rickford, “Black Power as Educational Renaissance,” in Erickson and Morrell, Educating Harlem; Winston-Griffith and Friedman, School Colors; Ransby, Ella Baker. ↩︎

  41. Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and its Legacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015); Deidre Flowers, “A School for Modern Times: Mildred Louise Johnson and the Founding of the Modern School of Harlem,” Journal of African American History 105, no. 4; Crip Camp, directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham (2020; Rock Hill, NY: James Lebrecht, Nicole Newnham, and Sara Bolder), netflix.com; Winston-Griffith and Friedman, Season 1, School Colors; Deaf Social Spaces. ↩︎

  42. Bonastia, The Battle Nearer to Home. ↩︎

  43. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017). ↩︎

  44. Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Shannon King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Rothstein, The Color of Law. ↩︎

  45. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States. ↩︎

  46. Kimberly Johnson, “Wadleigh High School: The Price of Segregation,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 77-100; Bonastia, The Battle Nearer to Home. ↩︎

  47. Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools;" Mayes, The Unteachables. ↩︎

  48. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1656510 ↩︎

  49. Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Bonastia, The Battle Nearer to Home. See also: Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎

  50. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Pub. L. No. 94-192, § 611, 89 Stat.773 (1975). ↩︎

  51. Mayes, The Unteachables; Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools. ↩︎

  52. Cheri Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City,. ↩︎

  53. John Cuscera with Gary Orfield, “New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction, and a Damaged Future” (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Civil Rights/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, 2014), https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf ↩︎

  54. Ransby, Ella Baker; Rickford, “Black Power as Educational Renaissance; Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and Radical Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Mark Winston-Griffith and Max Friedman, Season 1, School Colors; S.O. F.E.D. U.P. Handbook for the Disabled Students of Brooklyn College, CUNY; DiGiovanni, “Deaf New York City Spaces,”. ↩︎

  55. Rothstein, The Color of Law; Delmont, Why Busing Failed; Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis with Komozi Woodard, eds., The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South (New York: New York University Press, 2019). See also: Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎

  56. New-York Historical Society, Slavery in New York. ↩︎

  57. Burkholder, An African American Dilemma. ↩︎

  58. Craig Steven, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn 1636-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?; Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2021) ↩︎

  59. Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History. ↩︎

  60. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City: Understanding the Landscape.” ↩︎

  61. Almash, “New York City ‘600’ Schools”; Mayes, The Unteachables. ↩︎

  62. Alfredo J. Artiles, Sherman Dorn, and Aydin Bal, “Objects of Protection, Enduring Nodes of Difference: Disability Intersections With ‘Other’ Differences, 1916 to 2016,” Review of Research in Education 40, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 777–820 ↩︎

  63. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City.” ↩︎

  64. “Safeguarding Sound Basic Education: Constitutional Violations In New York State,” Teachers College Columbia University, accessed February 8, 2023, http://www.centerforeducationalequity.org/publications/know-your-educational-rights/29767_Know_Your_Rights_128-1.pdf ↩︎

  65. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City." ↩︎

  66. US Department of Education, “A History of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,” November 18, 2022. ↩︎

  67. Fancsali, “Special Education in New York City.” ↩︎

  68. Christina Veiga, “Few Options: Many NYC High Schools Are Off Limits to Students With Disabilities,” Chalkbeat New York, March 1, 2022, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2022/3/1/22957201/nyc-schools-high-school-admissions-students-with-disabilities ↩︎

  69. Kim Sweet, “End the School Bus Nightmares for New York Families,” The New York Times, November 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/opinion/school-buses-busing-new-york-city-department-of-education.html ↩︎

  70. Clifford Michel, “Staten Island Special Education Students Sue to Join Neighborhood School Classrooms,” The City, February 3, 2021, https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/2/3/22265468/staten-island-special-education-students-sue-nyc-schools ↩︎

  71. Christina Veiga, “This Teen With Autism Helped Persuade NYC’s Education Panel to Vote ‘No’ on Controversial Gifted Testing Contract,” Chalkbeat New York, February 2, 2021, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/2/22263151/nyc-student-advocate-disabilities-gifted ↩︎

References