Willie Mae Goodman decided to send her daughter Marguerite to the Willowbrook State School when Marguerite was four years old. Marguerite was born with developmental disabilities, and doctors argued that Willowbrook was an appropriate place for her.
Conditions for Marguerite, and other children and adults at Willowbrook, were horrible. The facility drew criticism from Senator Robert Kennedy, who described it as “not fit for animals,” as Mrs. Goodman recalls.
As Denise Oliver describes in this video, women involved in the civil rights movement faced sexism within their organizations, even when those organizations said they were committed to liberation and freedom. In addition to Oliver’s community organizing, she also challenged the misogyny within the ranks of the Young Lords Party. In collaboration with Iris Morales and other women in the party, Oliver pushed against masculinist ideas and for more complete ideas of liberation. As a result of this work, the Young Lords withdrew its idea of “Revolutionary Machismo” as necessary for liberation. They elected women to the Central Committee and pushed for representation of women in all levels of leadership. The party instituted punishments for sexist behavior within the party, formed a gay caucus as well as men and women’s caucuses for addressing sexism; and committed to ensuring equal participation between men and women as writers and public speakers.1
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
In early 1979, the Board of Education decided to change the rules for private bus operators in a way that would have lowered wages for many drivers. More than 2,000 bus drivers went on strike for over 13 weeks.
Marguerite Goodman lived at the Gouverneur Hospital in lower Manhattan. Her mother, Willie Mae Goodman, organized to improve Marguerite’s life at Gouverneur. This article by the New York Daily News identifies the many ways she and other family members of residents worked to change Gouverneur.
Palante was a self-published newspaper in which the various branches of the Young Lords Party highlighted important issues in their communities. They examined social issues through a critical lens that unearthed how colonialism, capitalism, and racism created problems for Puerto Rican communities.
Born in 1948, Iris Morales was the child of Puerto Rican migrants to New York. Morales’ political development began early as she recognized the barriers her parents faced in trying to access their rights as citizens. “As a child of migrants,” she would later recall, “we don’t speak the language, we don’t know how to navigate the court system, we don’t know how to access our rights.” In addition to her parents’ struggle in New York, Morales also learned the depths of inequality and segregation by watching “the horrific TV images of the civil rights movement.” She discussed the movement with her friends in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and acted in a school play produced by an NAACP youth group. She also participated in the 1964 student boycott of New York City’s schools, and worked as a tenants’ rights organizer.1
Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 12, 1912. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, who was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Because of her activism, Bayard engaged in protests against racial discrimination at a very young age. After spending time at Wilberforce College and Cheyney State Teachers College, Rustin moved to New York City in 1937. He began attending classes at City College and he became part of a radical network of activists and organizers. Through this network, he met and worked alongside Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and others. Randolph quickly noticed Rustin’s talent for organizing demonstrations. In 1941, Randolph enlisted Rustin to organize a demonstration at the United States Capitol against segregation in the armed forces and racial discrimination in employment. The pressure from this proposed march compelled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to sign an executive order that prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination in the nation’s defense industry, which was very active as World War II was underway.
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:
During the 1968 teacher strike, community control advocates continued to participate in leading local school districts and arguing for self-determination in education. UFT teachers protested during the strike in public spaces like in front of City Hall. Here, community control advocates walk across the Brooklyn bridge to show their support for local democratic power in education. One of the figures in the front is Rhody McCoy, who was the superintendent of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community control district in Brooklyn, where a controversy over whether local districts could fire teachers prompted the strike.
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
Civil rights organizers in Lowndes County, Mississippi, chose the image of a black panther as their symbol. They were fighting for voting rights and democratic power as part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. For decades, although Black voters were the majority of the population there, they had been locked out of voting by racist restrictions.
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
The 1965 boycott targeted segregation in New York City’s junior high schools and “600” schools. But for 2000 students - primarily Black and Puerto Rican boys - who attended the “600” day schools, those schools were places they were sent because they were labeled by the schools as “socially maladjusted” or “emotionally disturbed.” Some of the students had been ordered to attend these schools after interactions with the police and the juvenile legal system. Most students did not find a supportive educational environment there, and those who had disabilities did not receive the support they needed.
In the fall of 1964, months after the massive February 1964 boycott, Reverend Milton Galamison and the Citywide Committee on Integration launched another boycott. Galamison and the Citywide Committee - which included CORE (Congress On Racial Equality), Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, Harlem Parents’ Committee, EQUAL, and the Negro Teachers Association - focused on the city’s junior high schools and the “600” schools, which had inadequate facilities, no curriculum, untrained teachers, and improperly screened students. The groups’ demands included promoting many more Black and Puerto Rican teachers to leadership positions like school principal, desegregating junior high schools, and improving the “600” schools. Reverend Galamison was arrested for violating state education laws by “encouraging truancy” when young people stayed out of school to boycott.
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.
Reverend Milton Galamison was the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and a key figure in the struggle to desegregate New York City’s schools. As a religious and civic leader, he was the chair of the Education Committee for the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, founded the Parents’ Workshop for Equality in New York Schools, and organized the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. The Citywide Committee was a collaboration between the Parents’ Workshop, the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League, and the Harlem Parents’ Committee to organize the 1964 boycott.
In this op-ed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes about the “school boycott concept” and its application across the country, particularly in the North. He is writing more than two months after the February 1964 boycott, and nearly a month after the March one in New York City. There had been other large-scale school boycotts in other cities, too, as in Chicago in 1963.
On March 12, 1964 - between the first 1964 pro-integration boycott and the second - a group of white parents calling themselves “Parents and Taxpayers” led a march from the Board of Education building in Brooklyn to City Hall in Manhattan. White parents had organized and protested in favor of segregation earlier, as in the 1959 boycotts. This time, Parents and Taxpayers used many of the same protest tactics that civil rights activists used: marches and boycotts. They also claimed that they had to act to protect their rights, which they thought were threatened by desegregation plans. The name they chose for their group is important to notice. As historian Matthew Delmont has observed, by calling themselves Parents and Taxpayers, “these white protestors made an implicit claim that they occupied a higher level of citizenship than Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who were also parents and taxpayers.”1
