At the 2012 United States Conference of Mayors, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg reflected on the first ten years of mayoral control in New York City’s schools. He shared his thoughts on the purposes of schools in the US and his concerns about them. He explained why he believed mayoral control had been a success in New York City. He also highlighted his belief that the expansion of charter schools - which were new schools funded with public dollars but governed by private groups outside of the New York City Department of Education - had improved education in New York City.
After Camp Jened closed in 1977, many former campers stayed connected to one another. The sense of community and possibility they built at camp became an inspiration and source of strength for the developing disability rights movement.1
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw campus activism around the United States, for social change and against the Vietnam War. In New York City, students at various campuses of the City University of New York organized and protested in ways that changed their colleges and universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At City College, students organized a takeover of the campus demanding admission of more Black and Latinx students to the predominantly white campus in Harlem. At Brooklyn College, students pushed successfully for the founding of programs in Africana Studies and Puerto Rican Studies.1
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City. In the spring of 1968, the district’s governing board decided to fire 19 white teachers. Those teachers were affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The local community board and parents believed the union and its members were actively working against the community-control experiment that they had recently achieved. The UFT argued that the local board did not have the authority to fire those teachers. The UFT called a strike at the start of the next school year.1
No single civil rights organization represents all Black Americans. That was true in the 1960s and is true today. Different organizations have had different political visions, strategies, and styles.
The Black press provided a space for Black thinkers to challenge ideas that were getting attention in white newspapers and other media. James Farmer, an accomplished civil rights activist and National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality, used his column in the Amsterdam News, New York’s main Black newspaper, to share his critique of the Moynihan Report.
Concern about school segregation was not only expressed during the school boycott. On March 1, 1964, Puerto Rican community organizations held a civil rights march in front of City Hall. They were joined by a range of other organizations, including the New York Urban League and the Jamaica NAACP, and representatives of several labor unions including District 65 of the AFL-CIO and SEIU local 1199. Based on the content of marcher’s signs, segregation in education was a major concern for the marchers.1
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom sought to push for change in several ways. In addition to the planned demonstration involving more than 200,000 people, Randolph secured a meeting between John F. Kennedy and a selected delegation of civil rights leaders (including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, and others) to discuss policy proposals and changes that aligned with the march’s goals. The planned march echoed Randolph’s politics that connected economic security (jobs) with liberation (freedom). The organizers of the march intended for the demonstration to challenge racial discrimination not just in the South, but in the North; to call for an end to police brutality; to demand protection for accessing voting rights; to compel desegregation of the nation’s schools; and to push for a federal works program guaranteeing employment. Although the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom has often been reduced to one portion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful “I Have a Dream” speech, the demonstration and its organizers planned an event more radical and far-sweeping in its demands.
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
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
Asa Phillip Randolph was born in Crescent City, Florida in 1889. The vibrant Black community in Jacksonville, Florida, where his family moved early in his life, provided him with a powerful education and close-knit community.1 However, the systemic violence of the Jim Crow South and its limited economic opportunity compelled Randolph to migrate to New York City in 1911 in pursuit of greater opportunity. He took on various jobs while living in New York and enrolled in some courses at City College.
