Disabled students have always attended New York City schools, whether they were identified as disabled or not. Unfortunately, almost all of the ways New York City schools have tried to support Disabled students have involved students’ being separated from their peers. Students have attended separate schools, separate classrooms within schools, or have been pulled out of classrooms for part of the day. They have faced barriers to their full participation – like architectural barriers, or a lack of accommodations or teacher support. As a result, many students have felt that they were being treated differently – and less well than – their peers without disability labels.
In this segment of a 1974 news program, journalist Richard Kotuk introduces Mark Twain Junior High School. He records Black, Puerto Rican, and white students and families sharing how they feel about a judge’s recent order to desegregate the school. White students and parents express racist ideas about children at the school and its neighborhood.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
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. These images accompanied articles about the legal struggles of Mallory and the other Harlem mothers who had been charged with violating the state’s compulsory education law when they kept their children out of school. In some ways, she and her daughter became the face of the “Harlem Nine.”
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.
Many photos of New York City schools in the early 20th century show so many students that it is hard to see them as individual people. Photographer Florence Maynard spent several days inside public schools in the city, and her photos gave a closer view than most. Here, we see a group of students who seem to be of a range of ages. Most have light skin, and one is darker-skinned. They appear to be happy or excited — perhaps because, as Maynard noted in her caption, they were “well-doers on the way to receive the principal’s commendation,” or award.
Many New Yorkers lived in poverty in the 1890s, and depended on their children to work to help support the family. Other young people had to make their way without families, and worked to support themselves. Therefore, these children did not attend school (which was not necessarily illegal at the time). Charitable or non-profit organizations like the Children’s Aid Society were founded by wealthy New Yorkers to help improve the living conditions of children who were working rather than attending school.
New York City’s rapid growth in the 1880s and 1890s meant a dramatically increasing number of children in the city, and in schools. Not every child in New York attended school. Starting in 1874 New York State had laws that required students of some ages to attend school, but there was little enforcement and there were loopholes that allowed families to keep children out of school if the family said they needed the child to work. Continued racial segregation by law in some parts of the city limited Black students’ access to some schools. Meanwhile some Disabled children were not considered eligible for schooling, so these young people were excluded from school.1
