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Mark Twain on the 51st State, excerpt 2
Date: 1974
Caption: This portion of Richard Kotuk’s report on school desegregation at Mark Twain Junior High School includes interviews with Black, Puerto Rican, and white students and families.
In this segment of a 1974 news program, journalist Richard Kotuk introduces Mark Twain Junior High School. He records Black, Puerto Rican, and white students and families sharing how they feel about a judge’s recent order to desegregate the school. White students and parents express racist ideas about children at the school and its neighborhood.
In the video, white parents and students speak of “busing,” by which they mean students riding buses to go to schools that were in the process of desegregation. As historian Matt Delmont has shown, white activists used complaints about “busing” as a way to resist desegregation. Students rode buses to school long before attempts to integrate schools, and parents often wanted their children to travel out of their neighborhoods to schools for programs or opportunities that they supported. However, when New York City made efforts to desegregate schools in the late 1950s through the 1970s, many white parents said they opposed “busing” – rather than saying that they opposed desegregation.
Complaints about “busing” put white families preferences and comfort, and at times their racist attitudes, over the constitutional rights of Black and Puerto Rican students.1
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Matthew Delmont, Why Busing Failed, accessed April 10, 2024, whybusingfailed.com. ↩︎
Categories: Brooklyn, K-12 organizing
Tags: racist segregation, Black people, Latinx people, white people, childhood
This item is part of "Racist and Ableist Ideas" in "How Did New York City Segregate its Schools?"
Item Details
Date: 1974
Creator: WNET/Channel 13: The 51st State
Source: Richard Kotuk’s YouTube Channel
Copyright: Under copyright. Used with permission.
How to cite: “Mark Twain on the 51st State, excerpt 2,” WNET/Channel 13: The 51st State, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/mark-twain-on-51st-state-2.
Questions to Consider
- What do you notice about how students speak in this video about their school, their community, and their fellow students? Where do the students agree, and where do they disagree?
- Why do the white parents oppose desegregation? What claims do they make about busing and paying taxes?
- In your opinion, how are the views about integration expressed in these videos similar and different from those expressed by students and parents today?
- How do the ideas expressed here by white students and parents reflect or connect to racist ideas of the time, including those represented in the Moynihan Report?
References
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