Over 1 million new Black Southern migrants and Puerto Rican immigrants had settled in New York City by the 1950s. Most resided in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn. They faced many barriers, including poverty and discrimination in employment and housing discrimination, and often attended schools that the Board of Education had long neglected. The city’s centralized school system had often ignored Black residents’ demands while prioritizing the needs and wants of white students and their families.1
The Black Panther Party’s Harlem Branch, founded in 1966, defined Black Power as “having the right to self-determination or the power to decide what should go down in our community,” and “being the decision makers, the policy makers.”1
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on June 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin. The Act banned segregation in public places, including schools, parks, theaters, and hotels, and it denied the use of federal funds for any program that practiced segregation. The Act even authorized the Office of Education to assist in facilitating school desegregation.
In this op-ed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes about the “school boycott concept” and its application across the country, particularly in the North. He is writing more than two months after the February 1964 boycott, and nearly a month after the March one in New York City. There had been other large-scale school boycotts in other cities, too, as in Chicago in 1963.
After the massive turnout for the February 3, 1964 boycott, there was little response from the Board of Education. Organizer Reverend Milton Galamison and other desegregation advocates sought to keep the pressure on, pushing the Board to produce a meaningful desegregation plan. They called for a second boycott to take place on March 16, 1964.
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. It shows Baker’s approach as a teacher. Students at the Freedom School would examine why the boycotts took place, how segregation in the South and the North were similar, and how they experienced racism in places like New York. The outline also shows her insistence that northerners recognize and examine racism on their home terrain, not only in the Jim Crow South.
