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.
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 Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools included several New York City civil rights organizations. They produced this flier to recruit participants for the February 3, 1964 boycott. They used different kinds of text and a photograph to make their argument that a boycott was important and necessary.
The flier designed by two Queens civil rights organizing groups - the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - calls for a boycott to protest segregation in New York City’s public schools.
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.
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.
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more. She pushed for freedom. Baker saw the pursuit of liberation as a collective effort, and she valued the views and passions of young people. As historian Barbara Ransby put it in her biography on Ella Baker, Baker believed “people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out…Baker’s pedagogy was democratic and reciprocal…her view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. She did not want her students to see her as the repository of all knowledge but to discover their own insights and knowledge base.”1
The document above comes from a publication printed by the NAACP’s New York City Youth Council called The Challenge. Starting in 1935, the NAACP organized youth councils, originally composed of young people ages nineteen to twenty-five. Over time, more high school students joined youth councils and junior youth councils were created for students thirteen and under. Youth councils throughout the country took part in demonstrations and even started their own. Ella Baker, who worked with young people through the NAACP in a variety of ways, was one of the adults who worked with the New York City NAACP’s Youth Council. Adult leaders like Ella Baker supported young people as they determined the issues that were important to them and helped bring their ideas to the broader public. This issue of The Challenge illustrates how students crafted their own voice in challenging segregation and other issues relevant to their lives.
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed. The difference of a few points on a single test could mean placement or exclusion from a regular class with academic instruction. CRMD classes - or classes for “children with retarded mental development” as they were called by the Board of Education - had much lower expectations for students and too frequently had teachers who were not trained to support students with intellectual and other disabilities.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.
