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.
Five years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the New York City Board of Education announced a plan to desegregate a few schools in Brooklyn and Queens. Black and Puerto Rican students who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, would be bused to a few schools in the Glendale-Ridgewood area of Queens, where the schools were all-white. Parents, and particularly white mothers, organized this protest.
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.”
Camp Jened was located in the northern Catskills, on over 250 acres (which is about ⅓ the size of Central Park, or as big as 250 football fields) with 22 buildings near the town of Hunter, New York. The camp’s founders designed it to welcome Disabled children and adults, who did not often have access to summer camps and outdoor recreation. Camp Jened was the first camp of its kind for Disabled youth in New York and first opened in July 1953. It ran until August of 1977, and then reopened in 1980.1
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.
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.
In March 1925, The Survey Graphic published a special issue. The national magazine with a predominantly white readership invited Alain Locke to guest-edit the issue. He wrote that the issue was meant “to document the New Negro culturally and socially,—to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years.” The issue explored the origins of jazz and “Negro folk music,” the “inner life of Harlem,” the community’s “organizing social forces,” the neighborhood’s youth, and the conditions of the schools they attended.1
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.
Who should have made decisions about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of children in New York City’s schools? Increasingly in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the first decades of the 1900s, social reformers celebrated the idea that experts should be the ones to make key decisions. These social reformers - primarily white people from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds - saw many problems in the city around them. They were concerned about crime, public health, food safety, and children’s lives, among other areas. And they felt confident that they had the knowledge and skills to address these problems effectively, rather than the many thousands of working-class and poor New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, who made up the majority of the city’s population.1
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City required more and more students to attend school and prohibited them from working. In these years, the school system created a variety of special classes and schools for Disabled children, as well as for students who skipped school or otherwise got into trouble. Deaf students went to specialized schools for a few years, and then were expected to join their non-disabled peers in general education classrooms. Blind students were also intended to learn beside their non-disabled peers with the help of special instructors. The Board of Education created ungraded classes for children with intellectual disabilities, who educators thought should be segregated from other children and learn different subjects. Though not specifically mentioned in this document, some children with physical disabilities received home instruction because architectural barriers kept them from accessing school buildings.
New York City’s Public School 47 opened in 1908. It was the city’s first public school for Deaf children, and students came to the school on East 23rd Street from all over the city. Some lived at the school, while others commuted from their homes.1 Other Deaf students in New York City attended other private or religious schools, but they did not typically attend schools alongside hearing pupils.
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.
Special education classes for children with intellectual disabilities were pioneered in New York City by a social welfare reformer, Elizabeth Farrell. Farrell had been working with Lillian Wald and other reformers at the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. Henry Street was built to provide community support and education to new immigrants to New York City, most of them from southern and eastern Europe.
Photography has an important place in African American history. When racist practices and beliefs denied Black people’s dignity and humanity, Black individuals and families with the means to do so could go to a photography studio and present themselves as they wanted the world to see them. Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery, used photography to spread the powerful image of himself that he wanted the world to see and recognize. Douglass made himself the most photographed person in the US in the 19th century, in a time when cameras were large, cumbersome, and expensive, and could be accessed only by going to a photography studio.1
