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. White parents were furious with the decision and threatened to subvert the court order, leave the city, or withdraw their children from public schools. The district school board, whose members were all white, shared the white parents’ preference for segregation, but also felt that they had to meet the requirements of the court.
Jeffrey Hart was a student at Mark Twain Junior High School in Brooklyn. Hart’s mother and her attorneys brought a suit against the local school board, arguing that the school was unconstitutionally segregated.
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. Historically, because of limited educational opportunities for Black students and racism in the tests and processes that decided whether a student was “gifted,” most of the students in these special classes were white students.
In this segment of a 1974 news program, journalist Richard Kotuk introduces Mark Twain Junior High School. He records Black, Puerto Rican, and white students and families sharing how they feel about a judge’s recent order to desegregate the school. White students and parents express racist ideas about children at the school and its neighborhood.
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. In the 1968-1969 school year, City College students organized to demand change in admissions policies, curriculum, and support. They identified five demands:
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City. In the spring of 1968, the district’s governing board decided to fire 19 white teachers. Those teachers were affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The local community board and parents believed the union and its members were actively working against the community-control experiment that they had recently achieved. The UFT argued that the local board did not have the authority to fire those teachers. The UFT called a strike at the start of the next school year.1
In the summer of 1964, the New York City Board of Education issued a very modest plan for desegregation. The plan would pair eight schools in segregated Black areas of Brooklyn and Queens with a few segregated white schools, also in Brooklyn and Queens. This “pairing” was a common approach to desegregation at the time. White parents opposed the desegregation plan, and rallied against “busing” or “forced transfers” of their white students to new and desegregating schools - or the transfer of Black students to their local white schools.1 They claimed they were fighting for “neighborhood schools” and that their opposition to “busing” was about their children’s safety, not maintaining segregated schools.
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. White parents had organized and protested in favor of segregation earlier, as in the 1959 boycotts. This time, Parents and Taxpayers used many of the same protest tactics that civil rights activists used: marches and boycotts. They also claimed that they had to act to protect their rights, which they thought were threatened by desegregation plans. The name they chose for their group is important to notice. As historian Matthew Delmont has observed, by calling themselves Parents and Taxpayers, “these white protestors made an implicit claim that they occupied a higher level of citizenship than Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who were also parents and taxpayers.”1
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.
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.
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
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 should have made decisions about what happened to the hundreds of thousands of children in New York City’s schools? Increasingly in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the first decades of the 1900s, social reformers celebrated the idea that experts should be the ones to make key decisions. These social reformers - primarily white people from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds - saw many problems in the city around them. They were concerned about crime, public health, food safety, and children’s lives, among other areas. And they felt confident that they had the knowledge and skills to address these problems effectively, rather than the many thousands of working-class and poor New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, who made up the majority of the city’s population.1
