Black and Latina Women’s Educational Activism
This collection explores Black and Latina women’s education advocacy in New York City from the late 1800s to the present.
Histories of the civil rights movement tend to emphasize charismatic male leadership, like that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and pay much less attention to Black and Latina women. 1
Read More
They also tend to focus on activism against racism and racial segregation more than struggles against ableism and for disability rights. And when they do document disability rights struggles, they tend to focus on white activists and white Disabled people rather than Black or Latinx Disabled people and activists. Accounts of this history almost always neglect the ways that racism and ableism have been connected over time, and how some activists fought against both together.2
Black and Latina women saw that segregation was a problem in their city. They identified a range of racist and ableist policies that caused it, and criticized the culture of poverty theories that blamed Black and Latinx families for their children’s educational deficits. They found multiple ways to challenge segregation. They went to court, organized boycotts, demanded policy changes, pushed for new opportunities for their community’s children, advocated for their own children, and much more. Some created educational spaces within their activist groups. Some did this work as parents, some as teachers, and some as community organizers. Some were all three.
In each document set you will see an image of an activist or activists. These images make us think about representation - meaning how people present themselves to others and how they are represented by others. How do the different women in these portraits choose to represent themselves? Or, who chose to represent these women, how, and why? How do representations matter for how we understand the past, and how we think about the present?
Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw provided the term “intersectionality” to describe the ways racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination intersect, interact, and overlap with one another.3 For example, Black women face both racism and sexism not as separate challenges, but in connection with one another. Sexuality and gender identity also interact with racism and sexism. Black or Latina women who are disabled experience ableism and disability differently than their white peers, for example. As you read about each of these women’s lives, consider how they experienced multiple oppressions, shaped their own identities, and decided how they would fight for justice. How do their experiences and their ambitions feel similar to, or different from, yours today?
-
Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), chapter 7. ↩︎
-
Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: a Disability Justice Primer (Berkeley: Sins Invalid, 2019); Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), and see Schalk’s discussion of her work on Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness. ↩︎
-
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum no. 1 (1989): 139-167, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf and this interview with Columbia Law School. For a similar formulation of this idea that predates Crenshaw’s article, you can view [the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement here(https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf). ↩︎
Elizabeth Cisco Resisting Segregation in Queens
Black parents, including Elizabeth Cisco and her husband Samuel Cisco, resisted the policy of school segregation. Their actions helped change New York state law.
View primary sources
Lucile Spence and Teacher Activism
New York City put many barriers in place to prevent Black teachers from getting jobs. Many of the Black teachers who cleared these hurdles worked together and found a variety of ways to seek equality for New York students.
View primary sources
Mae Mallory and the “Harlem Nine”
In 1957, a group of Harlem parents, including mother of two and activist Mae Mallory, sued the Board of Education. Then they organized a boycott to highlight segregation and inequality in their children’s junior high schools.
View primary sources
Willie Mae Goodman Fighting Willowbrook
Willie Mae Goodman and the Gouverneur Parents Association used legal suits, direct protest, and persuasion to try to improve the treatment of children with developmental disabilities like Margeurite Goodman.
View primary sources
Denise Oliver and the Women of the Young Lords Party
The Young Lords organized in New York’s Puerto Rican communities starting in 1969. They addressed a range of issues that affected Puerto Ricans, including poor sanitation, poor health care, hunger, and poor education.
View primary sources
Audre Lorde and Student Protest at CUNY
Audre Lorde was a writer, activist, and educator at the City University of New York. She worked with student activists who were part of the movement to make CUNY’s enrollment and curriculum more inclusive of Black and Puerto Rican students.
View primary sources
