Malcolm X Comments on the Boycotts
The second school boycott took place on March 16, 1964.
racist segregation
School Boycott!
The Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools included several New York City civil rights organizations.
Why the School Boycott?
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.
Claim Teachers Used Pupils as Shoe Shine Boys: DA Calls Charges “Serious”
In late 1963, The Amsterdam News reported on allegations that teachers and administrators at P.
Life Magazine Cover
The 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom was an amazing organizing success.
A. Philip Randolph Letter to President John F. Kennedy
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom sought to push for change in several ways.
White Queens Mothers Protest Desegregation
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.
Mae Mallory and her daughter Patricia
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.
In the matter of Charlene Skipwith, excerpt
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.
“We’d Rather Go to Jail.”
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.
Jansen Must Go!
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.
Commission on Integration, Subcommittee on Zoning Draft Report, excerpt
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.
Check Your School!
Ella Baker was an influential organizer in New York City struggles against segregated schools, police brutality, voting restrictions, and more.
We Kept Our Retarded Child At Home, excerpt
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.
Your Child and Willowbrook, excerpt
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.
NAACP Youth Council News Bulletin, excerpts
The document above comes from a publication printed by the NAACP’s New York City Youth Council called The Challenge.
Jim Crow School Kids as Mentally Unfit
By the 1940s, New York City schools frequently used intelligence tests to decide which kind of schooling a child needed.
Underwriting Manual, excerpt
As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934.
HOLC Map and Area Description
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.
Hotel Pennsylvania Meeting Learns of Harlem School Ills
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.