Abstract
“We will go to jail and rot there, if necessary, but our children will not go to Jr. High Schools 136, 139, or 120,” asserted Mrs. Viola Waddy.1 Mrs. Waddy was part of a group of African American mothers who had been keeping their children out of three Harlem junior high schools since the beginning of the 1958 school year. The black press dubbed the group the “Little Rock Nine of Harlem,” an honorific title that favorably compared the women to the “Little Rock Nine” in Arkansas, the group of high school students whose integration efforts had made national headlines the prior year.2 Harlem’s “Nine” claimed that their sons and daughters were not receiving an equal education in these Northern segregated schools.
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Notes
“Parents Close Special School,” New York Amsterdam News, October 18, 1958. In the fall of 1957, nine African American school children attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The mobs of white residents who attempted to block the students from entering the school became a national and international story, as did Governor Orval Faubus’s use of the Arkansas National Guard to achieve the same purpose. Though President Eisenhower called in U.S. paratroopers to protect the nine students, and in June 1958 the first black student graduated from Central High, the struggle continued through the fall of 1958 when Governor Faubus closed all of the public high schools in Little Rock. The schools were not reopened until August 1959, when the Supreme Court ruled that the closing was unconstitutional. See Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay Co., 1962f);
Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom (New York: Bantam, 1990), 36–52;
and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 222–225.
The literature on Northern (and Western) struggles for equal educational opportunities generally picks up the story with the Supreme Court’s 1973 challenge to de facto segregation (Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1) and the court-ordered school busing cases of the early 1970s. Boston’s busing war has received a fair amount of attention (see Jeanne Theoharis’s critical analysis of this literature in this volume). Other examples include Gregory S. Jacobs’s study of Columbus, Ohio’s 1977 court-ordered school desegregation case, Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); George R. Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School Desegregation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983); several essays in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1996), including “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” by Susan E. Eaton, Joseph Feldman, and Edward Kirby, and “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” by Gary Orfield.
The recent publication of James T. Patterson’s Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and ensuing debate about the court’s, the civil rights attorneys’, and the historians’ attention to Northern school segregation underscores that this remains a contentious historical and contemporary issue. See Lewis M. Steel’s review of Patterson’s book and letters to the editor in The Nation, February 5, 2001, and April 30, 2001.
The media coverage of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict specifically and the Northern civil rights movement in general focused on the militancy of the black community leadership’s demand for community control. Journalist Daniel Schorr has talked about the ways in which reporters were directed to focus on violent aspects of the movement. See interview with Schorr, Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews, exhibition video, “The Civil Rights Movement,” (produced by the Jewish Museum, New York, 1992). For references to various partisan accounts and scholarly interpretations of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville episode and a discussion of the conflict’s 1950s context, see Adina Back, “Blacks, Jews and the Struggle to Integrate Brooklyn’s Junior High School 258: A Cold War Story,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20 (winter 2001): 38–69.
Annelise Orleck, Alexis Jetter, and Diana Taylor use the term “motherist” to describe the activism of mothers, which may include but is not necessarily limited to a maternal rhetoric. The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), Introduction. See also Kathleen Blee, ed., No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York: New York University Press, 1998);
Evelyn Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (Routledge: New York, 1994);
and Molly Ladd-Taylor and Laurie Umansky, eds., “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Charles Green and Basil Wilson, The Struggle for Black Empowerment in New York City (New York: McGraw Hill, 1989); “2000 at Moslem Feast in Harlem,” New York Amsterdam News, July 20, 1957; Robin D. G. Kelley, “House Negroes on the Loose: Malcolm X and the Black Bourgeoisie,” 16 (essay, author’s personal possession); and Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” 2–5 (essay, author’s personal possession).
Remarks by Mayor Wagner at Dinner of the Urban League, February 15, 1954. Robert F. Wagner Papers, New York City Municipal Archives (hereafter referred to as the Wagner Papers), B.59, F.685. See Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) for a discussion of the intergroup relations field.
The work of E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939),
and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), strongly influenced postwar policymakers. As historian Regina Kunzel has noted, however, they were less inclined to focus on the aspects of Frazier’s analysis that indicted racism. Regina Kunzel, “White Neurosis, Black Pathology: Constructing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy in Wartime and Postwar United States,” in Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, 320.
See Michael Katz, The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–23, for a useful historical overview of the pathologizing of the “underclass.”
The testimony of various teacher organizations at the public hearing held by the Board of Education’s Commission on Integration in January 1957 offers insights into teachers’ attitudes about race. See Adina Back, “Up South in New York: The 1950s School Desegregation Struggle” (Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1997), chapter 3.
Report of the Sub-Committee on Education and Recreation of the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem and Recommendations of the Sub-Committee on Education and Recreation, Supplemental to the Report of April 1942 (personal collection); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 215.
Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 23.
Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), chapter 5. According to Grant, Baker was critical of the New York City branch of the NAACP for paying little attention to “problems in its own backyard.” Curiously, Baker’s biographers also pay little attention to her leadership in the Northern civil rights movement, though biographer Barbara Ransby describes that moving to Atlanta to work with SCLC was a difficult decision for Baker to make as she was “deeply involved” in the local struggles for educational equality.
Barbara Ransby, “Ella J. Baker and the Black Radical Tradition” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 199–200. Baker’s organizing skills and philosophy, well honed in the North, suggest links between Northern and Southern civil rights activities worth exploring more fully. Historians’ inattention to pre-1960s Northern civil rights activism is demonstrated again in Kenneth B. Clark’s oral history interview conducted for the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. In this extensive interview, which was conducted over the course of 14 sessions between 1976 and 1985, the oral historian never once asked Clark about his involvement with New York City’s school integration movement.
Ellen Cantarow, “Ella Baker—Organizing for Civil Rights,” in Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, Ellen Cantarow and Susan O’Malley, eds. (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1980), 68.
Justine Wise Polier, Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy: The Distanced Community and Vengeful Retribution (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 152.
“School Board Appeal Enrages Baptists,” New York Amsterdam News, January 24, 1959. The Empire State Baptist Convention included all of the Baptists in New York State who attended some 340 churches. The Baptists represented the largest denomination of African American Protestants. See Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 236–238.
The next year, Reverend Taylor, one of Martin Luther King’s closest friends, was part of an insurgent group that included King and that tried unsuccessfully to get Taylor elected to the presidency of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). Their goal was to bring the NBC into the forefront of the civil rights movement. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, 227, 335–336. See also Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 197–198.
“The Message,” New York Amsterdam News, July 27,1957. See Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers & Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) for the best compilation to date on civil rights women activists.
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 268–274. Joanne Meyerowitz’s study of women’s magazines in the postwar decade concurs with Jones’s analysis and offers a general corrective to Betty Friedan’s monolithic characterization of America’s postwar housebound women. See Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958” in Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, 229–262.
Many scholars have written about the emergence of a postwar theory of black family pathology. In addition to works cited in note 14, other works that focus especially on the gendered aspects of these theories and their impact on black women include Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), chapter 14; Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American
Belinda Robnett probes the meanings and forms of black women’s leadership in the Southern civil rights movement in which leaders like Ella Baker and Septima Clark described being excluded from the formal network of male religious leaders. How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Fannie Lou Hamer’s biographer, Chana Kai Lee, describes the ways in which Hamer was discriminated against by NAACP male leadership, who considered her an inappropriate leader as a poor, uneducated woman. According to Lee, Hamer had a sharp analysis of class divisions and hierarchy within the civil rights movement. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For other discussions of women’s roles, see Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers & Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 172. Women (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), chapter 6; and
Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992), chapter 2.
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© 2003 Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, with Matthew Countryman
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Back, A. (2003). Exposing the “Whole Segregation Myth”: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles. In: Theoharis, J., Woodard, K. (eds) Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_4
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