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