DISCRIMINATION IN NEW YORK SCHOOLS CHALLENGED
By Evelyn Sell
A boycott of the New York City school- system, to begin February 3, was announced by the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. It is being organized by the City-wide Committee for Integrated Schools which includes local chapters of the NAACP, CORE [Congress for Racial Equality], Harlem Parents Committee and the Par~ ents Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools, "Freedom schools" will be operated to continue the children's education during the _ boy~ cott.
Second=class education for minority groups has been a sore spot in New York for a long time. School boards tend to set up school districts which conform to housing patterns, Children normally attend the school in their neighborhood; and Te) segregated housing leads to segregated schools,
OA boycott was threatened last September but was called off after an. agreement was reached that the Board of Education would present a pian for, integration of. sae _eltyts schools by December i.
A half-hearted plan was finally presented on December 9, This called for such measures as the establishment of 233 after-school | study centers, recruitment of more Negro and Puerto Rican. teachers and a free~choice plan of school enrollment allowing students to attend any school on a list drawn up by the Board of Education.
Civil-rights groups refused to approve the plan, "The progress report. of December 9 fails at every point to meet the criteria set for it. by the’September agreement," said Frederick Jones, education chairman of the State Conference of NAACP branches. "It represents a piecemeal approach consisting of nothing more than proposals which the NAACP rejected as inadequate at the time of the September agreement,"
The Urban League charged in a 108-page report that segregation in city schools was worse than ever,
On December 16 the -City-wide. Committee sponsored a sit-in and march to protest school conditions in Brooklyn, one of New York's five boroughs. Twenty-five persons were arrested for staging a sit-in in the Board of Education offices in Brooklyn while 100 Negro. and white pickets marched outside, chanting and singing,
The next day the Brooklyn chapter of CORE called for immediate removal of the city superintendent of schools and election of a new Board of Education, The present nine-member Board, appointed. by the mayor from a list drawn up by civil-rights groups, includes only one -Negro. re a
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Other Northern cities have engaged in boycotts and protests over school districting, teacher placement and hiring, textbooks which pre= sent an unfair picture of Negroes, inadequate and out-dated school facilities.
A one-day boycott staged in Chicago October 22 was the largest civilerights action of this kind in the history of the country, Almost 200,000 elementary and high-school students stayed away from schools that day. Percentage-wise the figures are quite revealing: About 51% of the city's elementary students are Negroes. On "Freedom Day" 51,4% of the total enrollment were absent, About 33% of the high-school a students are Negro. Here 38.4% were absent.
Some of the boycotting students attended special "Freedom Schools" held in 144 churches, union halls and community centers. Their teach ers were 300 teen-age volunteers from the "Student Advocates of Negro History." The classes dealt mainly with the history of the Negro in the United States, These students and their teachers were adding a. proud chapter to that history.
In the afternoon, between ten and twenty thousand children, youths and adults marched around Chicago city hall and the Board of Education building carrying such placards as: “Do Away with Ghetto Schools," "History Is Not All-White. Teach Us About the Black Mant" The day's activities were organized by the Co-ordinating Council of Community - Organizations which represents sixteen ma Jor civilerights Groups. [Pene, though less spectacular, protests were organized in
Det t
by GOAL’ [Group on Advanced Leadership]. During the past two years they have picketed and partially boycotted one of the city's all-Negro high schools to protest extremely overcrowded conditions, They have waged a.successful campaign to make the Board of Education throw out a biased history textbook, They have supported a court case instituted by. the Sherrill School Parents group against the Detroit Board of Education to force that body to desegregate the city's public school system,
The contrast between school fights in the ‘South and in the North was vividly presented in the December 5 New York Times. One article described how a single Negro was registering at Auburn University in’ Alabama for the first time in that school's history. A different article reported the call for a city-wide--boycott of New York schools.
_ In.the South, school integration has centered around court cases, army bayonets and the heroism of individual Negroes walking into class rooms amid the jeers and threats of racists. In the North, the tendency has been to involve the masses of the Negro urban communities, This has been the pattern up to now, .
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