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. As a religious and civic leader, he was the chair of the Education Committee for the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, founded the Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, and organized the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. The Citywide Committee was a collaboration between the Parents’ Workshop, the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League, and the Harlem Parents’ Committee to organize the 1964 boycott.
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.
In late 1963, The Amsterdam News reported on allegations that teachers and administrators at P.S. 614 in Brooklyn, one of the city’s “600” schools. The teachers being investigated allegedly pocketed over 40,000 subway tokens meant for students. Instead of handing the tokens out, students were forced to perform menial tasks like washing cars or shining shoes to earn the tokens back. Not only were students being mistreated, they were being denied education. The school’s principal and administrators didn’t offer any information at the time but were later reassigned to a different 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. 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
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
Italian immigrant Leonard Covello was the principal of East Harlem’s Benjamin Franklin High School, an all-boys school. Drawing on his own experience immigrating to the US, Covello wanted to create a school where students’ home cultures could connect to the school’s. Early in the 20th century, most of Franklin’s students were Italian American. Covello created spaces within the school to welcome parents and community members, including through specific Italian American clubs, and extended the school out into the community. He opened a multilingual library and a job placement center on a street close to the school, and welcomed students and parents there.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Benjamin Franklin High School was a dynamic place. Its students came from all over the world to the East Harlem campus. Many were Italian American immigrants; others had migrated from Puerto Rico or were Black migrants from the Jim Crow South. The high school’s principal was interested in ways to connect community and school, and political action was one activity he encouraged to this end.1 Students participated in war-related campaigns to gather or save resources, including paper, during the war.
Benjamin Franklin High School students came together in clubs that celebrated their cultural identities, like Club Borinquen and clubs focused on Italian American culture. And they worked together on projects to make change in the world, as when they gathered resources to help in the effort to win World War II.
On April 16, 1937, Lucile Spence and the Teachers Union of New York organized a conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in downtown Manhattan to discuss schools in Harlem.
On March 19, 1935, rumors spread through Harlem that police had beaten a young man to death after they arrested him for allegedly stealing a knife from a local store. As New York Police Department officers regularly used violence in policing the neighborhood, the rumor was believable, even if it was not in fact true. Nevertheless, the rumor sparked a revolt by community members concerned about policing and many other kinds of injustice due to racism and the impact of the Great Depression. The police responded to the uprising with violence, resulting in the death of three Black men, more than 100 arrests, and at least another 100 people injured.1
School zones establish where students go to school, often on the basis of where they live. This map shows how the New York City Board of Education zoned Wadleigh High School, an all-girls school, during the 1930s and 1940s. It shows the school zone lines and population data from the 1940 US Census to illustrate who was living in the area at this time.
In March 1925, The Survey Graphic published a special issue. The national magazine with a predominantly white readership invited Alain Locke to guest-edit the issue. He wrote that the issue was meant “to document the New Negro culturally and socially,—to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years.” The issue explored the origins of jazz and “Negro folk music,” the “inner life of Harlem,” the community’s “organizing social forces,” the neighborhood’s youth, and the conditions of the schools they attended.1
Scholar W.E.B. DuBois was an editor of The Crisis, a magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP). DuBois wrote a short editorial in the magazine, responding to claims that intelligence test scores showed Black people to be less intelligent than white people.
The Brownies’ Book included different kinds of writing, visual art, and photography by adults. But it also included letters from readers. Black children from around the United States who read the magazine sometimes wrote back.1 What they chose to write about tells us what The Brownies’ Book meant to them and what was happening in their lives.
The NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book to speak directly to Black children about the world and their lives. The images in the magazine were a key part of how the magazine worked to help its readers know (in the language of the time) that “being ‘colored’ is a normal, beautiful thing.” The creators also gave this issue the title “I am an American Citizen.”1
Here are a few pages from the first issue of the magazine. The editors of the magazine made many choices about their publication. They chose the text and articles, the images, the design, and more. Looking carefully at what they produced helps us think about their goals for the publication.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco worked for more than five years, with her husband and on her own, to fight for educational equality and desegregation. She pushed schools in the town of Jamaica, and then the board of education in Queens, and then the New York State Legislature, to end school segregation and provide equal opportunity for her children.1 A few days after the New York State Legislature passed a bill ending legal segregation in schools, Mrs. Cisco attended a gathering at a local Black church in the state capital of Albany. The newspaper captured the scene with the small description you see above.
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
