The New York City school boycott, also referred to as Freedom Day, was a large-scale boycott and protest against segregation in the New York City public school system which took place on February 3, 1964. Students and teachers walked out to highlight the deplorable conditions at public schools in the city, and demonstrators held rallies demanding school integration. [1] It has been described as the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s, involving nearly half a million participants. [2]
Freedom Day was part of a larger effort by activists to target the New York City Board of Education through acts of civil disobedience for their failure to implement a reasonable integration plan. [1] The protest followed the smaller Chicago Public Schools boycott, also known as Freedom Day, which took place in October 1963.
Although school segregation had been illegal in New York City since 1920, housing patterns and continuing de facto segregation meant schools remained racially segregated and unequal. At the time of the boycott, schools that enrolled mostly black and Latino students tended to have inferior facilities, less experienced teachers and severe overcrowding, with some schools operating on split shifts of as little as four hours a day of class time for some students. [3]
Opponents of integration, including a coalition of predominantly white neighborhood groups called Parents and Taxpayers, emphasized the importance of children attending schools closest to their homes and expressed concerns over busing. [3] [4]
Just prior to the boycott, the Board of Education released a plan for integrating the schools over a three-year period, including limited rezoning, reduction of overcrowding, and improved educational quality in schools serving black and Latino students. Pro-integration activists argued the plan was not comprehensive enough. [3]
A few days before the planned event, The New York Times printed an editorial titled “A Boycott Solves Nothing” condemning the activist leaders and claiming it would be violent, illegal, unreasonable and unjustified. [2]
The boycott was led by the Reverend Milton Galamison, who organized and chaired the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools, supported by the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Urban League, the Harlem Parents' Committee, and the Parents' Workshop for Equality. [5] The committee recruited Bayard Rustin, a prominent activist who had played a key role in the successful March on Washington in August 1963, to organize the boycott. [6]
On Monday, February 3, 1964, about 45 percent of all New York City students at the time stayed out of school in the boycott. An estimated 464,361 students and teachers participated overall, exceeding the number of people who took part in the March on Washington. [2] An estimated 90,000 to 100,000 boycotting students attended alternative classes in makeshift "Freedom Schools" where community educators taught lessons in religious institutions, recreational spaces, and private homes. [6] Of the city's 43,865 teachers, 3,357 were absent on the day, triple the usual number, despite threats from School Superintendent Bernard Donovan. [1] Demonstrators also rallied at the Board of Education, City Hall and the office of Governor Rockefeller. [7]
New York's newspapers expressed astonishment at the number of predominantly black and Puerto Rican students who participated — and the complete absence of violence or disorder from the demonstrators. [6]
The boycott did not achieve its objective of forcing immediate reform in the New York City schools, [7] and another school boycott planned for the following month failed due to lack of popular support. [8] Nevertheless, the event could be considered an important step in a much larger movement toward reform. [1]
Despite being a significant event in the history of the civil rights movement, the New York City school boycott does not appear prominently in U.S. history textbooks, perhaps because it runs counter to the dominant narrative that important historical events in the civil rights struggle mostly took place in the South. [4] [2]
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted five months after the New York City school boycott, included a loophole that allowed school segregation to continue in major northern cities including New York City, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. [4] As of 2018, New York City continues to have the most segregated schools in the country. [9]
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
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Clara Shepard Luper was a civic leader, schoolteacher, and pioneering leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. She is best known for her leadership role in the 1958 Oklahoma City sit-in movement, as she, her young son and daughter, and numerous young members of the NAACP Youth Council successfully conducted carefully planned nonviolent sit-in protests of downtown drugstore lunch-counters, which overturned their policies of segregation. The Clara Luper Corridor is a streetscape and civic beautification project from the Oklahoma Capitol area east to northeast Oklahoma City. In 1972, Clara Luper was an Oklahoma candidate for election to the United States Senate. When asked by the press if she, a black woman, could represent white people, she responded: “Of course, I can represent white people, black people, red people, yellow people, brown people, and polka dot people. You see, I have lived long enough to know that people are people.”
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James Peck was an American activist who practiced nonviolent resistance during World War II and in the Civil Rights Movement. He is the only person who participated in both the Journey of Reconciliation (1947) and the first Freedom Ride of 1961, and has been called a white civil rights hero. Peck advocated nonviolent civil disobedience throughout his life, and was arrested more than 60 times between the 1930s and 1980s.
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Oretha Castle Haley was an American civil rights activist in New Orleans where she challenged the segregation of facilities and promoted voter registration. She came from a working-class background, yet was able to enroll in the Southern University of New Orleans, SUNO, then a center of student activism. She joined the protest marches and went on to become a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
The Chicago Public Schools boycott, also known as Freedom Day, was a mass boycott and demonstration against the segregationist policies of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on October 22, 1963. More than 200,000 students stayed out of school, and tens of thousands of Chicagoans joined in a protest that culminated in a march to the office of the Chicago Board of Education. The protest preceded the larger New York City public school boycott, also known as Freedom Day.
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The Chester school protests were a series of demonstrations that occurred from November 1963 through April 1964 in Chester, Pennsylvania. The demonstrations focused on ending the de facto segregation that resulted in the racial categorization of Chester public schools, even after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka (1954). The racial unrest and civil rights protests were led by Stanley Branche of the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) and George Raymond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP).
The Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) was an American civil rights organization in Chester, Pennsylvania, that worked to end de facto segregation and improve the conditions at predominantly black schools in Chester. CFFN was founded in 1963 by Stanley Branche along with the Swarthmore College chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and Chester parents. From November 1963 to April 1964, CFFN and the Chester chapter of the NAACP, led by George Raymond, initiated the Chester school protests which made Chester a key battleground in the civil rights movement.
