On March 19, 1935, rumors spread through Harlem that police had beaten a young man to death after they arrested him for allegedly stealing a knife from a local store. As New York Police Department officers regularly used violence in policing the neighborhood, the rumor was believable, even if it was not in fact true. Nevertheless, the rumor sparked a revolt by community members concerned about policing and many other kinds of injustice due to racism and the impact of the Great Depression. The police responded to the uprising with violence, resulting in the death of three Black men, more than 100 arrests, and at least another 100 people injured.1
School zones establish where students go to school, often on the basis of where they live. This map shows how the New York City Board of Education zoned Wadleigh High School, an all-girls school, during the 1930s and 1940s. It shows the school zone lines and population data from the 1940 US Census to illustrate who was living in the area at this time.
Who were New York City’s students? This seemingly simple question became the focus of a citywide research project led by the Board of Education. From 1931 to 1947, the Board sent an index card like this one to each of its hundreds of schools. Those schools served a massive and still-growing population of students born in New York City, students who had been born outside the US (often in Europe or the Caribbean), and students who had been born in the US South and had participated in the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities like New York. Through this migration, New York City’s small Black population grew very quickly in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.1
State institutions grew throughout New York State after the founding of the New York Asylum in 1851 and into the mid-20th century. Labeled “inmates,” people with different types of disabilities were often counted and categorized alongside “reformatory” inmates, or delinquent youth, some of whom may have also been disabled. Other classes of inmates included “tuberculosis patients,” “Indian children,” and “veterans and widows of veterans.”
Scholar W.E.B. DuBois was an editor of The Crisis, a magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (or NAACP). DuBois wrote a short editorial in the magazine, responding to claims that intelligence test scores showed Black people to be less intelligent than white people.
The US Army offered up its recruits as a test population for the new intelligence tests. The tests had been initiated in France but then modified for new uses in the US by psychologists like Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes. The test’s creators promised to help the Army discern levels of preparation and aptitude among its soldiers.1
In 1905, French psychologist and educator Albert Binet created a tool that he hoped would help to identify and understand children who were struggling in school. Binet’s scale identified particular tasks that a “normal” child was supposed to be able to complete by a given age. This came to be called the person’s “mental age,” meaning that an 18 year old who could complete the tasks listed for a 12 year old but not those of older children would be said to have a “mental age” of 12. Binet did not think that the scale measured student’s natural intelligence, and he thought that intelligence could change over time.1
Henry Goddard was a psychologist living and working in New Jersey. He was the head of the Vineland Institute, but also researched and wrote about Disabled people and people labeled as disabled in locations around the country. In this report, he comments on the use of the Binet intelligence test to determine whether “delinquent girls” had the mental capacity to be responsible for their actions, or whether they did not.
A school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities opened on Randall’s Island in the East River in the 1860s - alongside the city’s almshouse, hospitals, and prisons. By the early 1900s, the school had been renamed the “Custodial Asylum and School for the Feeble-Minded.”1 At the time, the term “feeble minded” was a label used by educators, doctors, and government officials to indicate that a person had an intellectual disability. Intelligence tests were an important, if not the only, factor in deciding whether a person would be labeled “feeble minded.”
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.
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.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco worked for more than five years, with her husband and on her own, to fight for educational equality and desegregation. She pushed schools in the town of Jamaica, and then the board of education in Queens, and then the New York State Legislature, to end school segregation and provide equal opportunity for her children.1 A few days after the New York State Legislature passed a bill ending legal segregation in schools, Mrs. Cisco attended a gathering at a local Black church in the state capital of Albany. The newspaper captured the scene with the small description you see above.
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
Mrs. Cisco’s activism brought attention to segregated schooling in New York, and the state adopted a new law that ended legal segregation in schools. This legislation was regularly referred to as the “Elsberg Bill” because state Senator Nathaniel Elsberg introduced the bill. This Brooklyn Daily Eagle story narrates the events leading up to the bill’s passage, different responses after its signing, and the response of Mrs. Cisco’s attorney George Wallace.
After a few years of pushing for desegregation of the local Jamaica schools, Mrs. Elizabeth Cisco brought suit against the school board of Queens for violating the state’s education law. Previously, she and her husband Samuel Cisco had worked together, but Mr. Cisco passed away in 1897. Mrs. Cisco carried their work forward, alongside her attorneys.1
Samuel B. Cisco, a Black man, lived in Jamaica, in Queens County. At the time of this newspaper article, in 1896, Queens was not yet part of New York City, and Jamaica was a small town surrounded by a rural landscape. Mr. Cisco ran a successful scavenger business. He and his wife Elizabeth had six children.1 Although Mrs. Cisco is less visible in the article, she worked alongside her husband and continued their fight for years after his passing.
In the 1830s, the City purchased Randall’s Island to use as a remote burial ground for the poor and as an almshouse. Blackwell’s and Wards Islands were purchased later, and more institutions were built on the three islands to house and care for “various indigent, criminal, ill, poor, and disabled populations.”1 Journalist W. H. Davenport visited the “Insane Asylum” and “Orphanage and Idiot Asylum,” publishing his accounts of the residents and life in those facilities.2 The articles give a view of the conditions in these early reform institutions. Non-disabled children at the orphanage were taught in classes overseen by the NYC Department of Education. Children with physical disabilities (of which there were many) were taught how to craft products that could be sold. Children at the “Idiot Asylum” also had classes with a goal of preparing them for “useful occupations.”3
Édouard Séguin learned how to teach children with intellectual disabilities when he lived in France. Later, Séguin moved to the US and helped found schools around the country.
Many blind people lived in dire conditions in the city almshouse for the poor, because they were not able to support themselves and had no other place to go. After visiting the city almshouse with Samuel Akerly in 1831, John D. Russ decided to found the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. Russ brought three blind boys from the almshouse’s ward for blind men on Blackwell’s Island (in the East River and near Randall’s Island). He took them to a widow’s home for care and education. This small class was the first known attempt to educate blind children in the United States. Several other children joined the following year, learning through experimental techniques to teach reading and writing used by other educators. After a period of instruction, the boys took a public examination to show the value and effectiveness of educating the blind, and as an appeal to philanthropists to donate money to the cause.1
