--- title: The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott | TIME description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. canonical: https://time.com/video/I4zgXOYu/ og:title: The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott og:description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. og:url: https://time.com/video/I4zgXOYu/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I4zgXOYu/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott twitter:description: The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I4zgXOYu/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/I4zgXOYu.m3u8) (8:02)  _Published 2020-09-22. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:52 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs](/video/28opNCMF/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The Black Panthers' Health Programs [The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare](/video/7jWjdOdm/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: The Lavender Scare [The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement](/video/Y0oOfDDS/) ### The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement --- ## Transcript Stark video. How about that. James Hudson. Gone. Over for a long. Time. Oh, man. Much, much too long. I think the last time I saw you might have been at graduation. I think so. Yeah. That's what it was. Yes, man, That was with 64 before. In most classrooms. Row after. Row of empty chairs and up. In school, we're taught that the civil rights movement was all about segregation in the South. But the biggest protest of that era was actually a boycott of New York City's segregated school system. On February 3rd, 1964, nearly half a million students didn't show up to class and similar boycotts continued for months after. It was a massive movement, even bigger than the turnout for the March on Washington in 1963. This is John Dover and James Muhammad, formerly James Hudson. They appeared in this picture in the black newspaper the Amsterdam News, as students taking part in the boycott. Nearly 60 years ago. We were pretty involved young people, and I don't know whether we were selected or what. I know that. I know that that picture was staged, though. I know they told us all to like it. I could tell just by looking at it, you know? But. But I'm glad we were there, though. Yeah. Education was the key for our success. Our parents tried very hard to give us the best that they could at the time we joined the boycott because we recognized that there are always obstacles to it towards advancement for us as black people. So why don't more people know about this history? That's a great question. I mean, how can you have 460,000 people stay out of school and that hardly anyone sort of talks about it in textbooks afterwards? And part of the explanation is that the mainstream or white media at the time didn't feel the same sense of urgency that they treated civil rights in the South. I think it kind of fell out of the story. The story as most people learn, it starts with Brown versus the Board of Education. 1954 The Supreme Court makes a unanimous and important decision that segregation in education is unconstitutional. And really, a lot of what we learn and there. Students are left with thinking that once the court rules desegregation in schools actually occurs. And the reality is far from that. So it would be another ten years, a full decade before we see any meaningful school desegregation in the states of the South. But we don't see anything happening whatsoever in the North because Brown versus the Board of Education did not apply to schools that did not segregate explicitly by law. The greatest worry of the Negroes of Harlem is not color. Discrimination, but the squalid conditions in which they have to live. And school segregation in northern cities like New York worked hand-in-glove with practice called mortgage redlining, where the federal government gave banks the discretion to determine which neighborhoods were good and bad investments. They considered all white neighborhoods to be good investments, and so they would funnel mortgage funds there. They considered all black neighborhoods or racially mixed neighborhoods to be bad investments. And so banks would deny mortgage funding there. So while the North may have prided itself on not formally instituting segregation, economic realities contributed to racial divisions in many places, including New York City, which is home to the nation's largest public school system. It had been segregated in 1954 when a Supreme Court rules and it remained segregated. Ten years later, in 1964, during the height of the civil rights struggle. Ten years after Brown versus Board of Education, black and Brown students in New York City were more often learning in dilapidated buildings, in more crowded classrooms, and with far fewer resources than their white peers. And so understanding this, in 1964, parents and students of these African-American youngsters and Puerto Rican youngsters, they actually organized a citywide boycott of the public schools to protest the disproportionate allocation of resources. All we want is equal education. That's all equal education. It takes a tremendous amount of effort because in the school district in New York City is just massive local activists, primarily black women who are mothers. And then Reverend Milton Lampson do the work of organizing parents and students to stay out of school for one specific day. Nobody can do these children more harm than these children are being done every day in this public school system. And in my opinion, the refusal of the board to already have taken immediate steps to correct these evils is a disgrace and a crime. Chicago, Boston, other cities in the Midwest and North had similar school boycotts that were sort of themed and organized by some of the same people that really tried to press the issue that school segregation was not just a Southern issue, it was a northern issue as well. And just like in the south, there were white parents in New York that pushed back against desegregate schools. They call themselves parents and taxpayers, and they were led by a woman named Rosemary Gunning. It was important that they hardly ever used racial epithets, and they wouldn't explicitly say that they didn't want black and Puerto Rican students in their schools, but they would use a series of code words they would say were in favor of neighborhood schools or were opposed to bussing. They have a tremendous amount of power on the school board, tends to listen to them more than they listen to the black and Puerto Rican activists. And it certainly had a lot of impact nationally. The northern Midwestern politicians. Right. In the loopholes in the Civil Rights Act 1964 that explicitly prevent this, the Rights Act from applying to school segregation in places like Chicago, New York, Boston. I mean, it's one of the reasons it takes so long to get any meaningful integration in the North is that these white activists push back so hard that politicians were scared of offending their local constituents. And now. They are the bad since 1964. I don't see much of any progress being made in the education systems holistically in America. The fact that we're talking about the same subject, the same questions more than 50 years later, and we're given basically the exact same answer is no progress. Segregation. Well, New York City schools are still segregated. It's a function of the fact that we have never actually adequately addressed the problem of segregated schools. That now goes back more than half a century. Thank you. Education in America likes to lie. When you hear about segregation, you think it was a thing of the past and that, you know, after the civil rights movement, everybody's all good and Kumbaya down the street, you know, And it's just not it's just not true. Leon Nunez is part of Integrate NYC, a student led group fighting against segregation in New York City schools today. Nunez wasn't taught about the 1964 boycott in history class, but she learned about it through her work as an activist. History is so very important and reading through the artifacts and what their demands are and seeing how they're not at all very different from what we're demanding today is kind of sad. But also, I think a little empowering because they did that, you know, and learning the lessons from what made it successful and whether room for improvement can help us right now. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The History You Didn't Learn: The NYC School Boycott","description":"The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/I4zgXOYu/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2020-09-22T00:20:30.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/I4zgXOYu.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/I4zgXOYu/","duration":"PT8M2S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/I4zgXOYu/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```