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.
Judge Jack Weinstein ruled Mark Twain unconstitutionally segregated in 1974. He identified actions taken by various public and private actors to segregate Mark Twain and the surrounding District 21 schools. He concluded that, “The evidence shows that Mark Twain is segregated … [partially] due to deliberately zoning out of the school white middle-class children, enhancing segregative tendencies and leading to gross under-utilization of Mark Twain’s physical facilities… Both the Community School Board of District 21 and responsible city educational officials recognize that they have the power to desegregate Mark Twain. They have refused to do so.”
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.
This map illustrates the boundaries of Community District 21, which includes the Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Gravesend neighborhoods of Brooklyn, among others. The map also shows the junior high (or intermediate) schools within the district. Each dot on the map represents 50 people. Using 1970 Census data, the map on the left uses pink dots to represent the reported white population of the area, and the black dots represent the reported “black” population of the area. The map on the right uses red dots to represent the “Spanish Origin or Descent” population. Those identifying on the Census as “Spanish Origin or Descent” may have also identified as “white” or “black” on the Census.
New York State’s 1969 decentralization law drew strong opposition from many Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who had been advocating for community control. United Bronx Parents was based in the South Bronx and had been founded in 1965 by Puerto Rican organizer Evelina López Antonetty. United Bronx Parents had worked for years to support Puerto Rican mothers in pushing for better education for their children. Community control fit within this agenda.
During the “Harlem Nine”’s struggle to integrate schools in New York City, multiple newspapers, including The New York Times and Amsterdam News, published photographs of Mae Mallory with her daughter Patricia. These images accompanied articles about the legal struggles of Mallory and the other Harlem mothers who had been charged with violating the state’s compulsory education law when they kept their children out of school. In some ways, she and her daughter became the face of the “Harlem Nine.”
On October 28, 1958, in two separate cases, the Board of Education charged the “Harlem Nine” parents with violating the state law requiring parents to send their children to school. Judge Nathaniel Kaplan was the presiding family court judge in the case involving four of the parents. He found them guilty of violating the law.1 But less than two weeks later, two of the parents had their case heard by a different judge. Judge Justine Polier dismissed the charges against the parents in her courtroom.
In 1958, one year after nine Black students made national and international news when they desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregation activists in Harlem organized their own protest. Nine mothers in Harlem decided to keep their children out of local junior high schools to protest both segregation and the conditions in those schools. They knew that their children’s schools had poorer facilities, a more limited curriculum, and more unlicensed teachers than the city’s segregated white schools. The press called these parents the “Harlem Nine,” echoing how the Little Rock students had been called the “Little Rock Nine.”1
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.
In its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional because separate schools for Black children were “inherently unequal.” Citing the work of Black psychologist and City College professor Kenneth Clark, among others, the court argued that segregated schools were unconstitutional because segregation taught a message of racial superiority for white students and racial inferiority for Black students.1
As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934. Many Americans were living in unsafe or low-quality housing, while the economic downturn caused by the Great Depression threatened the banking and construction industries. Congress passed the National Housing Act to “encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions, to provide a system of mutual mortgage [or home loan] insurance, and for other purposes.”1 Lawmakers hoped to reinvigorate the banking industry and encourage banks to make more housing loans by guaranteeing that home loans, or mortgages, would be paid back. If potential homeowners could no longer afford their mortgage payments, the federal government agreed to pay the remaining principal balance.
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.
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
