Puerto Ricans became citizens of the United States in 1917, as part of the US’s claiming control of the island. As US citizens, those who wanted to come to the mainland faced fewer barriers than immigrants from other countries. In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans made the choice to migrate. Many came to New York City. Racial segregation in housing meant that they often lived alongside Black families like Toni Cade Bambara’s in Harlem. They also lived alongside Italian-American and Black families in East Harlem and the Lower East Side.
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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.
Who were New York City’s students? This seemingly simple question became the focus of a citywide research project led by the Board of Education. From 1931 to 1947, the Board sent an index card like this one to each of its hundreds of schools. Those schools served a massive and still-growing population of students born in New York City, students who had been born outside the US (often in Europe or the Caribbean), and students who had been born in the US South and had participated in the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities like New York. Through this migration, New York City’s small Black population grew very quickly in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.1
Immigrants helped New York City grow and prosper in the late 1800s and early 1900s, yet they faced many anti-immigrant attitudes in their new home city. Negative attitudes towards immigrants increased as more people from southern and eastern European countries (like Italy and Russia), rather than from Northern and Western countries (like Ireland and Germany), began to arrive. Many New Yorkers perceived these new immigrants to be very culturally, religiously, and at times racially different than themselves. Notice the choices that cartoonist Louis Dalrymple made in this cartoon. What people or groups does he include, and how does he show them visually? What text does he include, and what message does this send? What does the caption say?
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
