When Judge Jack Weinstein initially issued a court order to integrate District 21 schools, he proposed a wide-reaching plan that called for the Board of Education, District 21’s school board, and private real estate developers and housing officials to integrate the district’s neighborhoods and schools.
The all-white board of Community School District 21 in Brooklyn approved a proposal to desegregate Mark Twain Junior High School by making it a school for “gifted and talented” students - or, in the language of the day, students in “special progress” or “rapid advancement” classes.
In this video excerpt, reporter Richard Kotuk attempts to explain how what he calls “central Coney Island” has become predominantly “poor, Puerto Rican, and black.
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.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City.
The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (excerpt) Daniel Patrick Moynihan Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor March 1965
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.
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.
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.
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.
