Under decentralized school governance, each community school district had its own school board, and members of that board were elected by parents and voters who lived within the community school district’s boundaries.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City.
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.