Why 460,000 New Yorkers Walked Out of School in 1964
Our penultimate episode of 2020
Good morning, subscriber,
Last time, we talked about David Muzzey, whose racist textbook infused northern classrooms for generations. Guess what? In 1964, New Yorkers reached their boiling point:
This week’s story comes from articles in The Metropole, Time, WNYC, and more; and also from the second episode of the podcast “Nice White Parents.”
Next time on Skipped History…
We’ll talk about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal New Yorker whose personal experiences helped shape mass incarceration as we know it today. His is a fitting story to wrap up Season 1 of Skipped History. I’ll send more info about Season 2 next week!
An interesting tidbit: in 1966, “topical singer” Phil Ochs also criticized so-called “liberals.” Be warned, the following song is very catchy, and though some of Ochs’ quips haven’t aged well, others hold up, including a few references to housing and school segregation (e.g. at 2:05):
Here’s hoping the Biden transition team sings a different tune.
Love me, LOVE me, looooovvveeee me, seeee you next week. (As always, this week’s transcript is below.)
-Ben
Can’t wait until then? Follow Skipped History on Twitter for more bits of skipped history.
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. I’m recording this video before the election so, still, no spoilers. Today’s story is about the 1964 New York City School Boycott. I read about it in a few articles, as well as heard about it in the podcast “Nice White Parents. “
Before getting to the boycott, let’s look at the connection between school segregation and redlining, a discriminatory housing policy in place from the 1930s until the late 60s. Through redlining, neighborhoods with more than 5% people of color received C or D ratings from the Federal Housing Administration. These ratings meant people in those neighborhoods couldn’t get loans to maintain their property, which led to deteriorating conditions. In turn, that led white landlords and homeowners to keep people of color out of their neighborhoods lest they get bad ratings, too, which in turn widened school segregation and worsened conditions in minority-majority schools. It was a nasty process, and for context, the only thing that’s made more New Yorkers miserable for avoidable reasons is the Knicks.
The entrenchment of redlining is one reason that Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling, only kind of struck down segregated schools. In fact, as Milton A. Galamison, a reverend in Brooklyn, noted in a letter to New York City parents in 1964, “Despite the l954 Supreme Court decision, there are more segregated schools in New York City today than there were ten years ago.” By then, overcrowding in schools attended by Black and Puerto Rican students was so bad that William Jansen, the Schools Superintendent, who said segregation wasn’t his problem, instead of sending those students to less crowded white schools, implemented part-time school days, with half of the students attending for the first half of the day and the other half of students attending for the latter half of the day. As we saw last week, the inequities also extended to white-centric curricula, leading Galamison to demand, “We must have “the Negro’s contribution to history properly presented in textbooks.” Surprisingly, he didn’t do what most New Yorkers do when we see a problem.
Instead, he planned a boycott for February 3rd, 1964, to be called “Freedom Day.”
Now, given how pervasive segregation was, and how bad conditions in minority-majority schools were—one school cited in Nice White parents had two barely functioning bathrooms for 6500 students—a boycott to send a message that enough was enough seemed reasonable. But if you were reading the New York Times, you might disagree. Leading up to the boycott, an editorial creatively titled “No more school boycotts” framed the planned protest as “tragically misguided” and generalized all boycotts as “pointless”, “dangerous” and “destructive,” which, yes, double as the nicknames for Donald Trump’s soon to be imprisoned children. (Fingers crossed.) The newspaper also criticized Galamison and said that “For the foreseeable future, many schools will remain predominantly nonwhite, simply because there is no realistic way to alter the balance,” a statement that sounds a lot like the reason I couldn’t get a B in 10th-grade chemistry: it would’ve required trying!
Despite the newspaper’s opposition, on February 3rd, 464,361 students and teachers participated in the boycott, making it the largest protest of the Civil Rights Era by far. Almost half of the city’s students didn’t show up for school. How did they spend their time that day? Well, yes there were reports of “lines outside some of the movie houses around the city”—who wouldn’t want to see 1964 classics with titles that leave nothing to the imagination like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies—but almost 100,000 kids attended 400 Freedom Schools which had been set up in community spaces around the city. There, boycotting teachers taught students about the history of slavery, discussed why they were protesting, and sang songs like ‘We Shall Overcome,’” which sounds like a pretty productive day—unless, you were reading the New York Times.
While grudgingly conceding that “the misguided boycott… was a success for its proponents,” reporter McCandlish Philips, who moonlighted as a copywriter for the Yankee Candleish McCompany, asserted that “most thought the boycott was not very useful” and quoted Dr. John H. Fisher, then-President of Columbia University’s Teachers College as saying the “boycott was a mistake from the beginning.” Many liberals shared this sentiment, including influential Rabbi Max Schenk, whom McCandlish quoted as saying, Black people “have been waiting now for 100 years, and now we’re asking them to wait a little longer.” Shenk got his wish.
The boycott failed to inspire the Board of Education to take meaningful steps toward diversifying the city’s schools, and today, segregation both in neighborhoods and schools is just as bad. According to a report in 2019, the city still has policies that “perpetuate [residential] segregation more (and allow integration less),” and according to another report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, New York now has “the most segregated schools in the country.” And things don’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Last year, when Mayor Bill de Blasio was pressed by an 11th grader on a call-in radio show about why he hasn’t made more forceful steps to integrate the city’s schools, he replied, “With all due respect, there is a task force, an extraordinary task force [that’s] coming out with their next report in a matter of weeks,” a statement that sounds a lot like Max Schenck saying wait just a little bit longer; and like William Jansen saying not my problem; and like why I couldn’t a C in chemistry: it would’ve required trying at all.
So, as we’re beginning to see, maybe liberals in New York haven’t been so great at addressing racism in America. In our season finale, we’ll look at one of the most damaging New York liberals of all: a guy by the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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Take a deep breath, look at some trees, and see you next Thursday.