Willie Mae Goodman decided to send her daughter Marguerite to the Willowbrook State School when Marguerite was four years old. Marguerite was born with developmental disabilities, and doctors argued that Willowbrook was an appropriate place for her.
Conditions for Marguerite, and other children and adults at Willowbrook, were horrible. The facility drew criticism from Senator Robert Kennedy, who described it as “not fit for animals,” as Mrs. Goodman recalls.
As Denise Oliver describes in this video, women involved in the civil rights movement faced sexism within their organizations, even when those organizations said they were committed to liberation and freedom. In addition to Oliver’s community organizing, she also challenged the misogyny within the ranks of the Young Lords Party. In collaboration with Iris Morales and other women in the party, Oliver pushed against masculinist ideas and for more complete ideas of liberation. As a result of this work, the Young Lords withdrew its idea of “Revolutionary Machismo” as necessary for liberation. They elected women to the Central Committee and pushed for representation of women in all levels of leadership. The party instituted punishments for sexist behavior within the party, formed a gay caucus as well as men and women’s caucuses for addressing sexism; and committed to ensuring equal participation between men and women as writers and public speakers.1
This mural of Evelina López Antonetty was painted by graffiti artist group Tats Cru in 2011. It is at 773 Prospect Ave in the South Bronx. In the mural, the artists refer to some of the terms that local residents used to refer to Antonetty. She was affectionately nicknamed the “mother of the Puerto Rican Community” and the “hell lady of the Bronx” for her unyielding activism and support of the Puerto Rican community.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
By the 1980s, Audre Lorde was working full-time as a writer. She had published essays and poetry. She had also been fighting cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 1978.
Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death. When she was an infant and a toddler, doctors encouraged Mrs. Goodman and her husband to place Marguerite in an institution. Her doctors predicted that Marguerite would not live beyond two years, and they told her parents that they could send her away.
Please note: This is work in progress. Please keep that in mind as you read. We are sharing this work in progress because these materials are relevant to discussions of school governance underway right now in New York. Please share your feedback at [email protected] and check back for updated versions soon.
Marguerite Goodman lived at the Gouverneur Hospital in lower Manhattan. Her mother, Willie Mae Goodman, organized to improve Marguerite’s life at Gouverneur. This article by the New York Daily News identifies the many ways she and other family members of residents worked to change Gouverneur.
In 1970, about one quarter of all New York City public school students were Puerto Rican. And in some parts of the city, like the South Bronx, that proportion was much higher, around 65 percent.1 Many Puerto Rican students spoke Spanish at home, but the local public schools operated almost exclusively in English.
Palante was a self-published newspaper in which the various branches of the Young Lords Party highlighted important issues in their communities. They examined social issues through a critical lens that unearthed how colonialism, capitalism, and racism created problems for Puerto Rican communities.
Born in 1948, Iris Morales was the child of Puerto Rican migrants to New York. Morales’ political development began early as she recognized the barriers her parents faced in trying to access their rights as citizens. “As a child of migrants,” she would later recall, “we don’t speak the language, we don’t know how to navigate the court system, we don’t know how to access our rights.” In addition to her parents’ struggle in New York, Morales also learned the depths of inequality and segregation by watching “the horrific TV images of the civil rights movement.” She discussed the movement with her friends in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and acted in a school play produced by an NAACP youth group. She also participated in the 1964 student boycott of New York City’s schools, and worked as a tenants’ rights organizer.1
Denise Oliver, born in Brooklyn in 1947, grew up in Queens. Her father, George Bodine Oliver, was a drama professor, a Tuskegee Airman, and one of the first Black actors to integrate Broadway in the 1940s. He was also active in New York’s Black leftist political circles, working alongside members of the Communist Party and their allies. Her mother, Marjorie Roberts Oliver, taught at a high school in Queens when Black teachers were a small proportion of the city’s teaching force.1 Eventually, Denise Oliver would follow in the educational footsteps of her parents and work as a teacher. She first taught at University of the Streets, a school for youth of color who had been pushed out or expelled from the city’s schools.2
Like many Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Evelina López Antonetty was frustrated that so many Spanish-speaking children were not learning to read. Many were being placed in classes intended for students with disabilities because they spoke Spanish. “I began to see the schools as an island,” Antonetty recalled, “After 3 o’clock, the school officials closed the doors and left the community. They made no input into the community. There were no teachers in the school from the community.”1
In 1969, parents in the South Bronx were concerned about what their children ate at school. A group of parents, mostly mothers, came to Evelina López Antonetty for help in addressing the issue. Antonetty and her organization, United Bronx Parents, agreed to help.1
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:
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
On February 3, 1964, an estimated 464,400 students - almost half the city’s enrollment - boycotted New York City’s segregated school system. Getting that many people to stay out of school and walk on picket lines in front of schools, all peacefully, required a great deal of work. So did organizing Freedom Schools, where children who were out of school could be safe, have meals, and learn.
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.
