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Although City College, where Audre Lorde taught, was in the predominantly Black and Latinx community of Harlem, there were very few Black or Latinx students who attended. In the 1968-1969 school year, City College students organized to demand change in admissions policies, curriculum, and support. They identified five demands:
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
In the summer of 1964, the New York City Board of Education issued a very modest plan for desegregation. The plan would pair eight schools in segregated Black areas of Brooklyn and Queens with a few segregated white schools, also in Brooklyn and Queens. This “pairing” was a common approach to desegregation at the time. White parents opposed the desegregation plan, and rallied against “busing” or “forced transfers” of their white students to new and desegregating schools - or the transfer of Black students to their local white schools.1 They claimed they were fighting for “neighborhood schools” and that their opposition to “busing” was about their children’s safety, not maintaining segregated schools.
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
During the February 3, 1964 boycott, there was a rally at City Hall. Students, teachers, and parents who were participating in the boycott gathered together to send a message to the mayor that they wanted action on desegregation. Simultaneously, small and large gatherings took place at schools around the city. Jimmy Brooks, a reporter from one of New York’s Black newspapers, the Amsterdam News, interviewed many participants. Their comments help us hear why people chose to participate in the boycott.
On February 3, 1964, an estimated 464,400 students - almost half the city’s enrollment - boycotted New York City’s segregated school system. Getting that many people to stay out of school and walk on picket lines in front of schools, all peacefully, required a great deal of work. So did organizing Freedom Schools, where children who were out of school could be safe, have meals, and learn.
On the day of the February 3 boycott, some participants gathered at the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn, where they marched and picketed. Later they decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. This silent film footage, an excerpt of one of several reels taken that day by the New York Police Department, captures the participants and their posters and slogans. Although the footage doesn’t have sound, it still captures the atmosphere of the day.
The 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom was an amazing organizing success. More than 200,000 people participated. Over the next few years, in response to the march and civil rights activism throughout the country, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968). Not all of the demands of the march were met and the legislation did not always meet the imaginations of activists and organizers. However, the organizing tradition that A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, among others, had cultivated through labor movements reached a new prominence in the 1950s and 1960s which opened the door for greater possibilities.
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.
