A 1964 boycott fought school segregation, but inequality continues

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During the civil rights era, Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers were frustrated with the constant claims of racial equality in the North. One look at public school systems, including New York’s, revealed that the educational inequities for their children didn’t look much different from down South.

On Feb. 3, 1964, named “Freedom Day,” the people spoke up. Bundled up against the 20-degree weather, thousands of students, teachers, and community members took to the streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn to bring attention to the disparities experienced in Black and Brown schools.

For Edward Gordon, today a 78-year-old music educator, the boycott was his first protest.

“It was an air of excitement,” said Gordon, adding that most of their parents didn’t know their kids were skipping class to protest.

Gordon didn’t plan on picketing that morning, but when he arrived at school, he and his friends decided to join in the action. “You are told to use your rights as an American and express yourself, and for the first time, you’re actually doing something, you’re thinking out of the box,” Gordon said.

Although the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, it was not strictly enforced. And educational inequality remained — and still does.

Today, segregation is still rampant in New York City’s school system. An estimated 83% of Black students and 73% of Hispanic/Latino students attend a school that is more than 90% minority students. These rates are significantly higher – over 90% – for Black and Latino students in the charter system. By comparison, Black and Latino residents make up nearly two-thirds of public school students and more than half of the city’s population. According to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), charter schools are the most “racially isolated” schools in the nation.

Decades ago, activists tried to prevent this

In 1958, nine mothers led the Harlem Nine Boycott, keeping their children out of school for 162 days in protest. With thousands of supporters, they successfully sued the city over de facto segregation: racial separation due to circumstance rather than law. Afterward, the Board of Education created an open education policy that allowed Black children to transfer to integrated schools.

Gordon, who grew up in Harlem, attended Commerce High School, which was later torn down to build Lincoln Center. He remembers the experience of going to one of the few integrated high schools in the city fondly.

“The kids got along well,” said Gordon. “I had white friends; I had Black friends; I had Latino friends. A lot of the time, if the adults get out of the way, the kids will work it out.”

The situation for Black and Puerto Rican students remained dire in certain neighborhoods, however. In December 1963, an article in the Amsterdam News revealed that students in a Brooklyn school with a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican population were washing their teachers’ cars, shining shoes, and cleaning the building alongside custodial staff.

In Black and Brown neighborhoods, schools were often overcrowded and underfunded. In Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and other areas, students were attending school in half-day shifts to accommodate the population. Many of those schools did not have libraries or gymnasiums.

By 1964, civil rights leaders recognized that it would take a larger demonstration to bring attention to the continuing segregation. Bayard Rustin, a key organizer of the famed March on Washington, planned the Freedom Day boycott with Reverend Milton Galamison, a civil rights activist and pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

“The strategy was to pressure the Board of Ed to take some meaningful steps, so the boycott didn’t have to happen,” said Christopher Bonastia, a sociology professor at Lehman College who researches school segregation in New York.

The pressure didn’t work

Although cities like Birmingham and Washington, D.C., dominate the records of civil rights history, New York City activists worked just as tirelessly. On Feb. 3, 1964, 44.8% or some 464,362 students, and 8% of teachers, did not attend school. Pickets marched at 300 out of the 860 public schools, and the day ended with 3,500 protestors, mostly children, marching on the Brooklyn Board of Education.

“As the pickets marched, they chanted ‘Jim Crow must go’ and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ and handed out leaflets,” wrote Leonard Buder of the New York Times.

As an alternative to attending school that day, many churches and some other organizations ran “freedom schools,” where volunteer teachers taught children about racial consciousness and justice.

The reaction to the boycott was varied. Civil rights leaders and prominent figures initially deemed it a success.

Bayard Rustin told the New York Times that the boycott was a “fair warning that the civil rights revolution has reached out of the South and is now knocking at our own door.” Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X both spoke out in support of the school boycotts.

Despite the media attention, though, the boycotts didn’t lead to widespread school integration.

In fall 1964, New York began a school pairing program in which mostly white schools and mostly Black schools in close proximity combined their student populations. Many white families responded by sending their children to private schools and moving to the suburbs. As a result, predominantly Black and Brown schools have continued to fall behind.

According to Clarence Taylor, a history professor at Baruch College who has studied the Civil Rights Movement in New York City extensively, the movement failed largely due to the inner conflict between civil rights organizations and activists, often including Galamison, and the “fierce resistance” from other parties.

“You can’t rule out the huge resistance to that movement coming from parents, coming from the Board of Education, coming from the FBI,” he said.

Inequality of resources is a primary issue that Gordon has noticed in his education career. “I went to an average high school, but we had two choirs, a synchronic band, a jazz band, and a symphonic orchestra — 60 pieces,” he said. “Most of the schools in my community now don’t even have a decent music program.”

To address the disparity, Gordon founded the Nubian Conservatory for Music in 1983, a classical music school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that focuses on expanding access to music education for Black community members and preserving the musical tradition of the spirituals.

In the late 1970s, when it was very difficult for Black musicians to find collegiate-level jobs, Gordon came up with the idea to “build our own collegiate institution in the Black community and hire ourselves.”

Building an institution

In the decades since, the Nubian Conservatory has trained students of all ages in classical vocals, piano, and violin. Gordon and his team continue to work toward offering a bachelor’s degree in music, despite being slowed down in recent years by finances. The conservatory has continued working to train students in both classical European music and — their main focus — the spirituals.

“The spirituals are the foundation of all Black American music,” said Gordon. Reclaiming these cultural roots is important not only for the preservation of the culture, but also for developing classical skills, he noted. While genres like hip-hop and gospel have long overtaken the spirituals in Black music culture, Gordon said learning the spirituals is a way to be marketable in the music industry.

Like the school system, many areas of the music industry are heavily segregated. A study from 2023 found that only 2.4% of orchestral musicians are Black, compared to 12.6% of the population in the United States. The segregation in music education is a primary cause of this gap.

In May, a lawsuit challenging segregation in NYC public schools moved forward in court. Still, Black and Brown schools are more likely to be under-resourced and under-performing, and the children are less likely to be admitted to prestigious schools.

“It’s worse now than ever,” said Taylor, referring to about segregation in the city’s school system and the “growing inequality.”

Gordon cited administrative issues as a key problem in the inequality between city schools.

“The body follows the head,” he said.