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.
This map illustrates the boundaries of Community District 21, which includes the Coney Island, Brighton Beach, and Gravesend neighborhoods of Brooklyn, among others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
