Start video, how bout that?
James Hudson!
John Dover!
It's been a long time!
Much too long. I think the last time I saw you might have been at graduation.
I think so. I think that's what it was.
That was, what, '64?
'64.
In most classrooms, row after row of empty chairs.
Jim Crow must go, ole, ole!
In school, we're taught that the civil rights
movement was all about segregation in the South.
But the biggest protest of that era was actually a boycott of the New York City's segregated
school system. On February 3rd, 1964, nearly half a million
students didn't show up to class and similar boycotts continued for months after.
It was a massive movement, even bigger than the turnout for the March on Washington in 1963.
This is John Dover and James Muhammad-- formerly James Hudson.
They appeared in this picture in the black newspaper, The Amsterdam News, as students taking
part in the Boycott nearly 60 years ago.
We were pretty involved young people, and I don't know whether we were selected or what.
I know that picture was staged, though. I know they told us... hold the paper...
I could tell just by looking at that.
But I'm glad we were there though.
Education was the key to our success.
Our parents tried very hard to give us the best that they could at the time.
We joined the boycott because we recognized that there are always obstacles towards advancement
for us as black people.
So why don't more people know about this history?
That's a great question, I mean how can you
have 460,000 people stay out of school and then hardly anyone talks about it in textbooks
afterward? I think part of the explanation is that the
mainstream or white media at the time didn't treat it with the same sense of urgency that
they treated civil rights in the South. I think it kind of fell out of the story.
The story, as most people learn it, starts with Brown v. The Board of Education.
1954, The Supreme Court makes a unanimous and important decision that segregation in
education is unconstitutional. And really, a lot of what we learn ends there.
Students are left with thinking that once the court rules desegregation in schools actually
occurs. And the reality is far from that. So it would
be another ten years, a full decade, before we see any meaningful school desegregation
in the states of the South. But we don't see anything happening whatsoever
in the North, because Brown v. The Board of Education did not apply to schools that did
not segregate explicitly by law. 60s NEWSREEL VOICEOVER: The greatest worry
of the Negroes of Harlem is not color discrimination, but the squalid conditions in which they have
to live.
School segregation in northern cities like
New York worked hand in glove with a practice called mortgage redlining, where the federal
government gave banks the discretion to determine which neighborhoods were good and bad investments.
They considered all white neighborhoods to be good investments, so they would funnel
mortgage funds there. They considered all-black neighborhoods or
racially mixed neighborhoods to be bad investments, and so banks would deny mortgage funding there.
So while the North may have prided itself on not formally instituting segregation, economic
realities contributed to real divisions in many places, including New York City, which
is home to the nation's largest public school system.
It had been segregated in 1954 when the supreme court ruled and it remained segregated ten
years later in 1964, during the height of the civil rights struggle.
Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, black and brown students in New York City
were more often learning in dilapidated buildings, in more crowded classrooms, and with far fewer
resources than their white peers.
And so understanding this in 1964, parents and students of these African American youngsters
and Puerto Rican youngsters, they actually organize a city-wide boycott of the public
schools to protest the disproportionate allocation of resources.
1964 PROTESTER: All we want is equal education. That's all, equal education.
It takes a tremendous amount of effort because the school district in New York City is just
massive. Local activists, primarily black women who are mothers, and then reverend Milton
Galamison, do the work of organizing parents and students to stay out of school for one
specific day.
REV. MILTON GALAMISON: Nobody can do these children more harm than these children are
being done every day in this public school system. And in my opinion, the refusal of
the Board to already have taken immediate steps to correct these evils is a disgrace
and a crime.
Chicago, Boston, other cities in the Midwest and North had similar school boycotts that
were sort of themed and organized by some of the same people that really tried to press
the issue that school segregation was not just a southern issue, it was a northern issue
as well.
And just like in the South, there were White parents in New York that pushed back against
desegregating schools.
They called themselves Parents and Taxpayers and they were led by a woman named Rosemary
Gunning. It was important that they hardly ever used racial epithets and they wouldn't
explicitly say that they didn't want Black and Puerto Rican students in their schools.
What they would use is a series of code words. They would say we're in favor of neighborhood
schools or we're opposed to busing. They have a tremendous amount of power. The
school board tends to listen to them more than they listen to the Black and Puerto Rican
activists. And it certainly had a lot of impact nationally.
The Northern and Midwestern politicians write in the loopholes in the Civil Rights Act of
1964 that explicitly prevent the Civil Rights Act from applying to school segregation in
places like Chicago, New York, Boston. It's one of the reasons it takes so long to get
any meaningful integration in the North is that these White activists push back so hard
that politicians were scared of offending their local constituents.
1964 PROTESTERS: Jim Crow must go, ole, ole!
Since 1964, I don't see much of any progress being made in the education systems holistically
in America.
The fact that we're talking about the same
subject, the same questions more than 50 years later, and we're given basically the exact
same answers-- no progress.
2019 PROTESTERS: Retire segregation!
Well New York City schools are still segregated. It's a function of the fact that we have never
actually adequately addressed the problem of segregated schools that now goes back more
than half a century.
Education in America likes to lie. When you hear about segregation you think it was a
thing of the past and that, you know, after the civil rights movement everybody's all
good and kumbaya down the street. And that's just not true.
Leanne Nunes is part of IntegrateNYC, a student-led group fighting against segregation in New
York City schools today. Nunes wasn't taught about the 1964 boycott in history class, but
she learned about it through her work as an activist.
History is so very important and reading through the artifacts and what their demands are and
seeing how they're not at all very different from what we're demanding today is kind of
sad but also I think a little empowering. Because they did that. And learning the lessons
from made it successful and where there was room for improvement can help us right now.