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Before the Boycotts: White Liberal Resistance

Before the Boycotts: White Liberal Resistance

White New Yorkers were relentless in opposing desegregation. Even very small-scale attempts by the Board of Education to desegregate schools - like programs that involved shifting only a few hundred Black students to majority white schools - prompted protests and backlash.1 The white media criticized civil rights organizing, calling the boycott “tragically misguided.” Polls conducted by The New York Times showed that 57 percent of New Yorkers thought the civil rights movement had gone too far and was moving “too fast” - even though New York had made almost no progress on school desegregation.2


  1. Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). See also: Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎

  2. Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). ↩︎

Commission on Integration, Subcommittee on Zoning Draft Report, excerpt

Mar 2, 1956

The Board of Education appoints a Commission on Integration to study racial segregation in New York City schools and make recommendations for integrating them.

White Queens Mothers Protest Desegregation

Jun 25, 1959

When a plan to bus Black and Puerto Rican students to schools in the Glendale-Ridgewood area of Queens with all-white schools is announced, white mothers organize a protest.

A Boycott Solves Nothing

1964

An op-ed in The New York Times captures an example of white, liberal New Yorkers’ resistance to desegregation.

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