The second school boycott took place on March 16, 1964. Although fewer people participated in the second boycott than the first, protests against the city’s segregated and unequal school systems remained strong. Black New Yorkers held different opinions on the source of oppression and how to respond to it. The organizers of the boycotts, for instance, believed that school integration provided a way to move towards a more equal society. Some, like Malcolm X, supported Black nationalism, which promoted economic self-sufficiency, pride in Black identity, and the formation of an independent nation. However, despite these differing views, Malcolm X took part in the second boycott, and he describes why he participated in this interview.
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.
In late 1963, The Amsterdam News reported on allegations that teachers and administrators at P.S. 614 in Brooklyn, one of the city’s “600” schools. The teachers being investigated allegedly pocketed over 40,000 subway tokens meant for students. Instead of handing the tokens out, students were forced to perform menial tasks like washing cars or shining shoes to earn the tokens back. Not only were students being mistreated, they were being denied education. The school’s principal and administrators didn’t offer any information at the time but were later reassigned to a different school.
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.
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.”
On October 28, 1958, in two separate cases, the Board of Education charged the “Harlem Nine” parents with violating the state law requiring parents to send their children to school. Judge Nathaniel Kaplan was the presiding family court judge in the case involving four of the parents. He found them guilty of violating the law.1 But less than two weeks later, two of the parents had their case heard by a different judge. Judge Justine Polier dismissed the charges against the parents in her courtroom.
In 1958, one year after nine Black students made national and international news when they desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregation activists in Harlem organized their own protest. Nine mothers in Harlem decided to keep their children out of local junior high schools to protest both segregation and the conditions in those schools. They knew that their children’s schools had poorer facilities, a more limited curriculum, and more unlicensed teachers than the city’s segregated white schools. The press called these parents the “Harlem Nine,” echoing how the Little Rock students had been called the “Little Rock Nine.”1
Harlem residents like Ella Baker and Mae Mallory, alongside other parents and community members in Brooklyn and in Jamaica, Queens, pushed the New York City Board of Education to integrate their schools. They gathered information about conditions in schools serving Black and Latinx students, and conducted “street meetings” where parents and interested community members could talk with each other about their concerns.
In its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional because separate schools for Black children were “inherently unequal.” Citing the work of Black psychologist and City College professor Kenneth Clark, among others, the court argued that segregated schools were unconstitutional because segregation taught a message of racial superiority for white students and racial inferiority for Black students.1
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
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, educators and social reformers created institutions for people they called “idiots,” “feeble minded,” or later, “mentally retarded.”1 They said that these facilities could train children and return them to society as productive citizens, and relieve the few overcrowded and understaffed “special classes” in city schools. State institutions like Letchworth Village were built to take on the responsibility of educating children outside of New York City.
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
As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934. Many Americans were living in unsafe or low-quality housing, while the economic downturn caused by the Great Depression threatened the banking and construction industries. Congress passed the National Housing Act to “encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions, to provide a system of mutual mortgage [or home loan] insurance, and for other purposes.”1 Lawmakers hoped to reinvigorate the banking industry and encourage banks to make more housing loans by guaranteeing that home loans, or mortgages, would be paid back. If potential homeowners could no longer afford their mortgage payments, the federal government agreed to pay the remaining principal balance.
In the US election of 1932, voters chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, as president, and elected overwhelming Democratic majorities in the United States House and Senate. Democrats promised to enact a “New Deal”—a package of social and economic legislation designed to bring the United States out of the Great Depression, which had begun three years earlier.
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.
