Nice White Parents - Ep. 2: ‘I Still Believe in It’
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These first two episodes of niche ite parents are free, but to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the new york times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and new york time shows and is super easy. You can sign up through apple podcast or spotify. And if you're already a time subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

The new york city board of education has an archive of all of its records. Everything that goes into making thousands of schools run for years is sitting in boxes in the municipal building. I love the boy archive.

First of all, to look through IT, you have to go to a century old municipal building downtown. Urge doorways, lots of marble and echo faulted ceilings really makes a person feel like she's up to something important. You sit at a table and the librarian rolls your boxes up to you on a part.

Inside the boxes are all the dramas of a school system, big ones, tiny one's biocon tic personal. It's all in there. There's a union contract and then a zoning plan and special reports on teacher credential.

A weird personal note from a bureaucrat to his assistant, a three page single space plea from Cindy's grandmother, who would please like for her not to be held back in the second grade. And a story and friend once pulled a folder out of the archive and a note fell out, something a teacher clearly made a kid right in the one thousand nine hundred fifty years. The red quote, I am a lazy boy.

Miss fitz Jerry says, when I go in the army, I will be extended. Extendable means that the country doesn't care whether I get killed or not. I do not like to be expendable. I'm going to do my work and improve.

I came to the board of ed archive after I attended the gala thrown wn by the french embassy, the fundraiser for sls organized by the new upper class weight families coming into the school. I feel like i'd just watched an unveiling ceremony for a brand new school, but I didn't really know what I was replacing. Everyone is talking as if this was the first time wait parents were taking an interest in the school for international studies.

But at the archive, I found out IT wasn't the first time why parents had invested in the school before, way before, at the very beginning of the school, before the beginning, I found a folder labeled I, S. To ninety three. Intermediate school to ninety three, the original name for S.

I S. And this folder was filled with personal letters to the president of the new york city board of education, a man named max rubin, pleading with him to please make eyes to and ninety three and integrated school. Dear mister rubbin, my husband and I were educated in public schools, and we very much want for our children to have this experience.

However, we also want them to attend to school, which will give them a good education. And today that is anonymous with an integrated school. Dear mr.

Rubin, as a resident of cobble hill, a teacher and a parent, I want my child to attend schools which are desegregated. I do not want her to be in a situation in which you will be a member of a small White middle income click. These are letters from parents, largely White parents, as far as I could tell, written in nineteen sixty three, just a few years before I.

S. To ninety three was built. An issue was where the school was going to be built.

The board of education was proposing to build the school rate next system housing projects. The school would be almost entirely black. And porter weekend, these parents wait.

Parents came in and said, no, no, no. Don't build IT there. Put IT closer to the weight neighborhood.

That way all our kids can go to school together. These parents, one of the school built in what was known as a fringe zone. This was a popular idea at the time.

Fringe schools to promote school integration comes up in the letters, dear mr. Rubin, this neigh's hood is changing with the influx of a middle class group, which is very interested in public education for their children. Dear mr.

Rubin, if there is a possibility of achieving some degree of integration, IT is more likely if the board of education theory of fringe schools is applied and from another letter IT is apparent from the opinion of the neighbor od groups involved that the situation is not at all hopeless. This lobbying effort was so successful that the board of education did move the site of the school. This is why sis is located where IT is today, on the fringe, closer to the White side of town, so that IT would be integrated.

I tried to imagine who these people were, Young, idealistic, White parents living in berkley in the one thousand nine hundred sixties, feeling good about the future they would have had their children. Around the time the supreme court ruled on Brown versus board of education, they probably followed the news of the civil rights movement unfolding downtown. Th, maybe there were supporters were active in the movement themselves.

These are White parents saying, we understand where at a turning point, and we have a choice to make right now, and we choose integration. One of my favourite letters was from a couple who left the suburbs to come to new york city for integration, the opposite of weight flight. Dear mister rubin, we have recently moved into the homely purchased at the above address in couple hill IT was our hope in moving into the neighbor od that our children would enjoy the advantages of mixing freely with children of other classes and races, which we were not able to provide to them when we lived in a west chester's suburb. So this is the letter.

This is the letter that I wrote. I can't believe IT OK.

this is Carol neta. Most of the literature were not that hard to fined.

We had moved to scars there for their children, because scars still has the best, probably still does the best school system in the country. But we hated IT. We found that we were brought to death with IT IT was blind.

IT was just imaginable. But living, I don't know if you have ever lived in. It's just boring, tedious you know there's nothing going on.

shouldn't link ever. So they moved to bricklin and wrote that letter, which I showed her, her thirty seven year old self, writing about her hopes for her Young children. I don't the traces SHE made back then.

but that sounds, as I was fairly impassioned about IT. Yeah, that that means something. But I actually, I can think what I meant.

I went through this box of letters and called as many parents as I could. Most of them didn't remember write in these letters, which isn't surprising more than fifty years ago at all. What I did find surprising is that by the time to ninety three opened five years later, none of them, not a one, actually sent their kids to I S.

Two ninety three. From serial productions, i'm fn, a jeffy walt. This is nice weight parents, a series about the sixty year relationship between White parents and the public.

Score down the block, a relationship that began with a commitment integration in the eighteen sixties. Much like today, weight people were surrounded by a movement for the civil rights of black americans, why people were forced to contend the systemic racism. And here was a group of White parents who supported the movement for school integration through their weight behind IT.

What happened in those five years between nineteen nineteen sixty three, when these White parents planted an impassion grow integration flag on the school in one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight, when I came time to enroll their children, why didn't they show up? These way, parents who wanted an integrated I S to to ninety three didion come to that idea on their own. They were part of a bigger story unfolding around them when to zoom out to that dramatic story, because IT takes us right up to the moment these parents wrote their letters and then made the decision not to send their kids to the school.

To begin, i'd like to introduce you to our main character in a historical tale. There is a bit of the parents letters, the new york city board of education, back in the one thousand nine hundred and fifties, the york city board of ed was not one of those boring bureaucracies that chugged along in the background. Keep in your head down.

IT had personality is invested in self image. For instance, in one thousand nine hundred and fifty four, when the supreme court found school segregation and constitutional, new york city didn't just say we support that ruling, is celebrated the Brown v board decision. And notably, IT celebrated itself, calling Brown quote a moral reaffirmation of our fundamental educational principal.

That same year, one hundred and fifty four, the near city board had made a film honouring multi cultural ism in its schools. The film opens with a multi tio quire of schoolchildren singing let us break bread together. Like I said, the board of that went the extra mile. The school's per intendent was a sixty six year old man named doctor William James, a man the newspapers described, a slow and steady, and he definitely delivers on that promise. Here.

the filing you're about to see tells the story of how the schools and community are working together to build brotherhood.

A teacher addresses her classroom filled with children of all races, es and ethnicities.

Who among you can give some of the reasons why people left their native plans to come to the united states of america?

The camera cuts to a White boy, maybe nine or ten.

Some came because they wanted to get away from the tyranny and cruelty of canes.

Then a black girl around the same age.

My people are free now. They are proud to be american. But the nichols were brought here by wicked men who traded in, say.

this keeps going, kid to kid.

We came a little while ago from year ago. My father wanted work. He wants to give me and my brother a good education.

Japan is very overcrowded. The people have little land. So many japanese came to this country because they wanted to form.

New york city was the biggest city in amErica with the largest black population in america. And IT was singing in films, press releases, public speeches. Brown vy board, we agree, separate but equal has no place in the field of public education.

No problem here. He was also saying, you know, who does have a problem? The south new york city loved comparing itself to the backwards south.

There are plenty of examples of this in the board archives, new yorkers bragging ing about their superiority to places like georgia or Virginia or lizana. This was the story the board of that was telling. The south was ignorant and racist.

New york city was enlightened and integrated. But here is what I was actually like, to walk into a york city school in a black neighbor. Od, at this time.

the school had an air smell. IT, was this, oh, IT smell like this. 你 还 不错。

This is an archival recording of a woman named memory in the thousand nine hundred and fifties, malaria is two black children were students in harm. And when malaria walked into their school, SHE did not see children building brotherhood in interactive al classrooms. SHE saw on all black important school was terrible for cities in disrepair.

So my kids told me, is my mummy, this is what we've been trying to tell you all on at this place is so dirty. And you, this is why we've run them to the bathroom night. So I went to the bathroom.

And the nineteen fifty seven in new york city, they had toilets that were worse than the toilets in the schools that I went to and make a George in the heart, the self, the toilet was a thing that looked like hostel. And then I had one long with who cut in IT. And then you would have to go and use the toilet, but you couldn't flush IT.

The water would come down, period, ally, and flush, you know, whatever there. Now, imagine what this is like, you know, dumping waste, E E N, top of waste that sitting there, waiting you, accumulating to the world to come. This was why this place smells so .

that mm says school had two bathrooms for sixteen hundred children.

Malarious family .

fled at racial violence in the south, like millions of other black americans who headed to places like new york city, where everyone was supposed to be equal, instead of welcoming these new students and spreading them out, greeting interaction, al classrooms, the board of education kept black importer we can students segregated in what we're sometimes referred to as geo schools, schools that were often just blocks away from White schools.

Weight schools in new york city had toilets that flush hed why children had classrooms with experience, teachers and principles, people who lived in their communities and looked like them. In black and portal rican schools, half the teachers were not certified to teach by the board of education. The buildings were in disrepair and packed, sometimes more than a thousand kids in a single hallway.

The overcrowd ding got so bad, the board of education decided to send kids to school and shifts in mind you, this was not in the middle of a global pandemic. This was Normal, non crisis school for black and porter ican kids. One group of children would go to school in the morning until noon.

The next group of kids would come in at noon and stay until three. The board was literally giving black kids half in education. In some schools in harlem, they had triple shifts. This made IT harder to learn elementary skills reading.

For instance, black parents complained that the schools were not teaching their kids basic literacy, that their way teachers didn't care, that the summer reading programs were only in White communities, that their children were two years behind White children in reading this. At exactly the same time, the board of education was making a film promoting the virtues of integration. IT was effectively running a door segregated and unequal school system.

For many black families, the board of education was not to be trusted. IT did not care for black children, and IT didn't respect the voices and concerns of black parents. Main mali so SHE visited her kids school that day because they've come home the day before and told her a child had died at school.

He was playing in the street at recess. Malory hardly believed IT, but he says when he visited the school, he learned yet, indeed, this child was playing in the street because the school yard was close. He was hit by a beer truck, and he learned the school yard was closed because pieces of seal from the side of the building had fAllen into the yard.

So when I found out that this was true, I went to the principle. So this principal tell me that, well, this is about, you really don't have you really about, you see our sunshine club want to see the mother, and we took her a bag of kind goods. So actually she's Better off because he had so many children to feed. And I could not believe that here a White man is going to tell a black woman and how that a kind paches is Better than your child. I just do know where what to do, where to go, but I know, suppose to do something.

IT was one thousand nine hundred and fifty seven, three years after the supreme court declared segregation by law on constitutional. York city didn't have jim crow laws on the books, but my memory would ask, the schools are segregated, what's the difference? SHE didn't care whether that segregation was caught fied by law or by convention. The harm was just as dire, and he wanted to addressed.

this was nothing to do with one in the sit next, the White house. But IT was obvious at a whole pad, a black return. Ation was the program of the board education. So I filed to against the world education, and I just felt that integration.

me, mali would say, was about, quote, demanding a fair share of the pie. SHE said. Our children want to learn, and they certainly have the ability to learn.

What they need is the opportunity. The board of education had defined integration as a multi racial quire. IT was a virtue in and of itself.

Memory saw integration as a remedy, a way to get the same stuff. Everyone else had functioning toilets, books, certified teachers, a full school day. Integration was a means to an end.

Mae mallorys won her lawsuit. SHE and a few other parents were allowed to transfer their kids out of segregated schools. As for the segregation in the entire system, the judge in the lawsuit turned to the board of ed and said, this segregation, it's your responsibility .

fix IT.

Now on the question of responsibility, the board of education was kg, and that k ess set the stage for the I S. Two ninety three parents when IT came time to send their kids to the school. Here's what happened.

The school's per intendent Williams Johnson decided school segregation was not his problem. In fact, he rejected the idea that york city had segregated schools in the first place. After all, york city was not boring black children from entering White schools.

This wasn't the south. Segregation, jensen said, is such an unfortunate word. He preferred to phrase racial imbaLance or racial separation the way he said racial imbaLance in the schools was just a matter of housing.

Neighbourhoods were segregated, again, unfortunate, but that had nothing to do with the schools. To make this argument, William jensen had to ignore the many powerful tools available to the board of education. The board of education was responsible for where kids went to school.

IT decided where to build new schools. IT drew zoning lines. IT decided where experience teachers teach.

There were many ways the board could have made schools less segregated. I know this because of the board's own reports. Jensen did very little to break up school segregation.

But man, did he study IT? He organized commissions that LED to reports, that LED to further study. You see a pattern emerge starting in the late one thousand nine and fifties, that looks something like this.

Black parents and civil rights groups would pressure the board to act on segregation. The board would invite its critics to join a commission to investigate the problem. The commission would study the schools, discover extreme segregation layout solutions. The board of ed would then take a tiny step toward implementing some of the recommendations until my parents started to complain about the changes, at which point the board would back off and say, IT needed more evidence. Another commission, another report.

For instance, there is the report on the committee on integration, a plan for integration, the city's children in the chAllenge of ratio discrimination, rebuilding efforts on integration, the board commission on integration, the status of the public school education of negro importer and children in new york city. And my favorite, a bound little red book from one nine hundred and sixty, called toward greater opportunity, which summarizes the previous with this ground breaking conclusion, quote, we must integrate as much as as quickly as we can, and when applied for one second, and step out of the past, back into the world we all live in. Just to point out that over the last few years in new ork city, we've been reliving this chapter of history.

It's early, near k city. Schools are segregated. There's a growing movement to do something about that. And for the first five years of his administration, the city's mayor, mayor, build a blazer, responded in the following way. He refused to say the word segregation, commissioned a number of reports on school diversity. He's pointed a finger at housing problems as a way to say, this is an our fault. And he's studying the problem deeply, which again, is not segregation, no matter how many times reporters would ask the mayor at press conferences, why don't you use that word?

I don't get lost in terminology. I think the notion of same way to diversify schools is the best way. I said.

I heard a live Colin show on W. N. Y. C, the public radio station, a Young integration advocate, and eleventh greater named Tiffany e. Torus, ask the mayor, how much longer until you do something, and how much more time do you need to study the issue? So to repeat my question.

how much longer will I take? Tiffany, with all the respect, I really think you're not hearing what we're saying. To use all repeat, there is a task force and extraordinary task force, which I met with.

They are coming forward with their next report in a matter of weeks. So when that diversity task force comes out, the reporter, I think they're amazing. I think they've done fantastic work. And so far, there's a high level of where to glaze.

You're likes to point out that this was a problem created by people long before him, which is exactly what people long before him said to.

In the late one thousand and fifties, when black parents and civil rights activists also asked the board of ed, why is IT taking so long? Board members complained about the quote.

Extremists who wanted instant integration, super tenda Johnson said, some people want us to build a rome and one day, while the board of education was building rome in one thousand nine hundred and fifty six, fifty seven, fifty nine and one thousand nine hundred and sixty, one thousand nine hundred and sixty two, sixty three black parents found each other on pts. In civil rights organizations, pro integration groups, they form new groups. Organizations boycotting demanded the board provide a timetable for city wide integration.

They joined forces with put in parents, and their numbers grew. These were volunteers, mothers mostly, who left their jobs at the end of a work day and had to directly to a meeting about how to get the board to give their kids the education White children were already receiving. Finally, in one thousand nine and sixty four, ten years after ground versus board, black importer y compared said enough, they were sick of waiting, sick of lawsuits, sick of asking for a remedy, sick of being ignored.

So they went big, spectacularly big. They shut down the schools. They organized the civil rites demonstration that was the largest in U.

S. History, larger than the march on washington. IT was called freedom day, a massive school boycott. On february third, one thousand nine, sixty four parents headed out to schools in the morning before sunrise to spread the word about the boycott was freezing called that day.

There's a brief T V news clip of a group of mothers picketing outside their kids school, the start of the school day. They're holding up signs that say we demand a real integration timetable now and integration means Better schools. All they're handing out leaflets to other parents about freedom day looking spirit and cold a wait. Nbc news reporter in a Flora walks up to one of the women excel boy cot. So far.

very far, about ten children have gone in, and that they would be ordinary two and forty children, and had gone into the morning excesses, which began to clock.

But you think you've already .

seen the results. You think so, the school just empty.

Does that surprise you?

No, because we knew how effector we knew. We talk with the panes. We've to distribute leaflets. We've been working very hard, and we pray that I would be accepted.

There were maps and charts and instructions with picket times and picket captains for hundreds of schools. There were volunteer shifts to make people Better jelli sandwich es to hand out thousands of leaflets and sensual posters. The boy cot wasn't just effective.

He was extraordinary ily effective. Half a million kids stayed home from school at that. Half a million close to half the school system, but the press barely covered IT.

After searching every major TV network, I found only one kid who was interviewed, teenage boy, maybe around sixteen, on the street with some friends protesting await. A B, C, news reporter doesn't ask him why he's there. The only thing he asked him about is violence.

The kid responds, we for a peaceful ful, we're we're not going to be violence. We just teenagers in kids. And do you expect vio lum thurday? no. So that if look at, look at blue uniform, you ask me to high rice van is he gestures to the police on horse back. None of us have any weapons, horses.

And all we want .

is equal education. That's all equal education.

Every once in a while, i'll hear a politician or friend or school administrator say, yeah, integration was a good idea, but there is no political will to make that happen. Four hundred and sixty thousand kids, half the school system, the will was there. The majority wanted integration.

After freedom day, the board of education introduced some small scale integration plans and way parents protected. Oh yes.

we do.

We will not. With their own marches, they put on their own school boy cut the flip side of freedom day, a White boy cut the way. Parents were far fewer in number. But as far as I can tell, they get a thousand times more press coverage. Are you to johnes back .

to school?

SHE was here. I once in my child.

He, so, no, I don't tell me where and my .

kid this protest worked, the board of ed backed off. And in the decade since the board of education has never proposed a cyl de integration plan, the schools have never been integrated. I think effect of weight mms in queens in the one thousand nine hundred six years, yelling about zoning changes, and it's not surprising they played a role in killing school integration efforts.

But there was another group of White parents who played a quieter, but i'd argue, more forceful, role in killing integration. The way parents who said they supported IT parents, like the ones who wrote letters asking for an integrated I S. To ninety three, how did their vocal support for integration turn lethal? That's after the break.

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I'm chef rick Williamson, and I used made in coker for full details. Visit made in coquart dot com. That's M A D E I N coquart dot com. In the american south, schools were desegregated with court orders, cities and counties Mandate ed desegregation and the schools degrees ted.

By the early one thousand nine and seventies, the south was the most integrated region in the country, but new york city did not want to do IT that way. No Mandates. The new york city board of education wanted to appeal to hurts and minds.

They wanted to sell weight. People on the virtues of integration have IT all happened. Quote, naturally, some way people were sold the way parents who rote letters about I S 2 ninety three， they believed an integration.

So I made a lot of calls to ask, why do bail? They had a lot of different reasons. One couple got divorced and moved. Another guy told me he had political ambitions ons that pulled .

them out of the city. We loved our Brown stone. Ah, I was involved in a political race, and we did IT to money for that.

So he sold the house and moved the family to the suburbs we thought have a Better chance running against republicans. Many wait. People move to the suburbs for jobs for newly paved roads and subsidize mortgage, leaving work kym behind.

I understood what happened there, but some explanations made blesse. Like one guy I called, he did stay in, broke in on the phone. He was telling me why he believed IT was important, that I S.

Two unity, three be integrated. But then he said his own kids went to brooklin friends, a quicker private school. I said, oh, they didn't go to I, S, to ninety three.

No, as I said, i'm a quicker and we.

you are a quicker. When you wrote this letter asking for an interest.

I L I believe in that, but but you weren't .

playing to send dear .

kid there. No, no, no. What to make of that .

when you get what you say you want and then given the opportunity, don't take IT. Maybe you never really wanted IT in the first place. Then I spoke to a lean hankey of all the people.

I spoke with everything about a lane indicated someone who did believe in integration, someone who would send her kids to two, ninety three. And yet SHE didn't. Alane was a public school teacher.

He taught in an integrated elementary school until he had her own kids. SHE was looking forward to sending them to integrated to ninety three when her daughter was old enough for junior high school and visited the school. SHE was the only literature I spoke with who actually went into the building. If this was gonna with anyone, IT was gonna be a lean.

I didn't I didn't know quite what to make of IT because the school had a nice plant physically IT was a nice school, but IT just seemed uh chaotic and noisy and um kids were disruptive and kids kids, we're doing the wrong things, you know, and good kids do. I mean, IT wasn't that they were naked kids or you know doing any, but they we're not drugs. IT was not drugs. IT was just IT just seemed too chaotic to me at the time.

and I talked for a long time. I pushed her not to make her feel bad, but to get to what felt like a more real answer at the time that you were visiting was IT majority black in husband and kids.

Yes, I am sure IT was ended .

that have anything to do with the way that you saw the classroom is disruptive in chaotic.

I would hope not um i'm not i'm not sure you know how well educated they were or you know I don't know I don't know why i'm going into this.

Did you have reason to think that they weren't too well educated .

before before to ninety three, although reading levels were way down? no.

I'm just what I mean, when you say cares and disruptive, I am trusting what you saw was chaotic and disruptive. But I also know that those are words you know, way people use. We used to express our racial fears, to express real racial fears. Like do you think that what was happening with you?

I don't think I would admit to that. I don't think that what's true. But what I may have thought was that. These kids are not expected to do so well in school all away from the beginning of school. And here they are really unprepared in some way for junior high school or and in the the reading levels were low.

alane told me when he wrote that letter to the board of education, SHE pick tue her children, becoming friends with black kids, learning side by side, learning that all children are equal, that would motivated her to write that letter. SHE wanted the picture of integration. The board of ed was promoting the picture of hermon's ous integration.

But when SHE visited I yes to twenty three, that didn't seem possible. The reading levels, word low. The kids were not entering the school on equal grounds.

Her weight. Children had received years of high quality teaching at well resource schools. The kids coming from segregated elementary schools had not had that experience.

I mean, one of of the problems has had many of the White kids had had higher sort of academic skills or a skills they could read Better than I I think. I mean, if the White kids knew how to read in first grade and and I guess there were black kids who also could, but I just seemed as if most of the black kids, you know didn't really learn learn to read. But but part of I mean.

part of the vocal complaints of black parents at this period of time was that their kids were not learning how to read because schools were segregated and their kids were kept schools that were inferior. And that was part of the argument for integration.

Yes, yes, that their kids were not going .

to get the resources and quality teaching and good facilities unless they were in the same buildings with kids like yours.

right? I don't know what to say to that. I I I just I guess I just. Began to feel that thanks. So really difficult for these kids.

Schools were not made them as the schools from nature of them with their background. What would they be like? I I think there was another another whole thing I don't know about IT.

I think there was sort of anger in the black community. At the White community, a lot of the teachers were White. Are there more White teachers?

I suppose people said that that was racism and and of course IT IT was racism. But maybe the kids were a little angry to school. I I wouldn't, I couldn't fall them for that.

But on the other hand, then they don't get as much from the school. I I don't know. I thought the problems were kind of enormous.

and. And I guess I just at one point, I just decided that my kids should go want to broke on friends. And I mean, we could afford to pay for this.

What's the easy? And you know that. But did your .

feelings about integration change? What did you believe in IT less?

Maybe I think I wouldn't said no theoretically, but maybe they they I guess I saw IT as more difficult project. Then I sort of I did backup from I I didn't yeah.

第一 IT felt when you guys wrote these letters like this is integration is this exciting ideal and we can be part of IT and it's gonna be a meaningful project that's also gonna be kind of easy。

I certainly didn't think that would be so difficult, but I, but I was, I was innocent, you know, I I don't know, still believe I do.

I think what a ae actually meant was not that he was innocent, but that he was naive. SHE was naive about the reality of segregation, the harm of IT and nave, about what I would take to undo IT. SHE did not know.

And I think SHE didn't want to know when alan said the word innocent, I felt a jot of recognition. I felt like alan had walked me right up to the truth about her and about me. When my own kids were old enough, I sent them to ozone public school.

IT was racially mixed and economically mixed. I was excited about that, and I was nice walking to school with neighbors. People are likely never would have gotten to know otherwise.

My kids first day of school was another boy's first week in the country. He just moved from china and his mom as neighbor. The school was when he said, goodyer, that first morning, I think he thought I was a teacher and he crawled into my lap.

We had no words in common, so I just held him while he screamed and cried by the holiday show. Three months later, I watch that same boy belt out this pretty planet on a stage with his classmates. He was a star.

He nailed the hand motions. Every other kid up on stage was just following his lead, just trying to keep up. He was such a sweet picture. All of them up there, black kids and mexican kids and colombian and asian, and my kids and all of us adults supporting all of them, is moving to me. This picture of integration IT is also, i'm realizing right now, writing these words down the very seen picture the board of education put fourth in one thousand nine hundred and fifty four, a multiracial quire, singing together, building brotherhood and its dangerous. I think this picture of integration IT seems perfectly designed to preserve my innocence, to make me comfortable, not to remedy inequality, but a way to bypassed entirely.

I can sit in that assembly and feel good about the gazi display of integration without ever being asked to think about the fact that much of the time why kids in the school building are having a different educational experience than kids of color, a large share of the weight students of the school are clustered in a gifted program. They have separate classrooms and teachers. We all lively, call his weight children gifted and talented.

G. N. T. Starting at four years old, wait children are performing Better at the school, and black children and Martino children, weight families are the loudest and most powerful voices in the building. The advantages wait kids had back in the thousand nine hundred fifties, they're still in place.

When ellean said he was innocent, I thought about the things we say, nice way parents to each other, about why we wants under kids to segregated schools because they're too strict or too chaotic or too disruptive, because the tech scores are bad, because we want more play. We want fewer workshops, because we don't want to write a bus, we don't want uniforms, we don't want tests, we want innocence. We need IT to protect us from the reality that we are the ones creating the segregation. And we're not sure we're ready to give IT up.

The lane was not for segregation, but in the end, SHE wasn't really for integration either. All of the choices SHE made, choices SHE had the luxury of making, were meant to advantage her own kids. And I understand that that's apparent to do.

I remember thinking very clearly that, okay, I believe in this, but I don't sort of want to sacrifice my children to IT. And I have to work at what they will learn, and, you know, what they will do. And for people who send their kids to two ninety three, IT seem to work out well.

So that made me thankful. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe they should have gone there. I know at one point that was very clear to me that I had believed that I, that I did.

I thought, what kind of contrary to my own children's best interests, and I decided that I wasn't gonna use them to, you know, to sort of extend my own police, that I then I regret that because that wasn't really true. You're regreted what? Well, I kind of wish I had sympson to to ninety three because Jones kids had a good experience there.

Elan's friend jan, another weight mom who did send her kids to I S two ninety three a still feels bad about her choice. But not everyone felt bad.

We were not a pious kind of, oh, the kids have to go to public school, not at all. What I went to public school thing, there's nothing to rave about.

Carol is the woman who wrote the letter about how she'd come to new york city from the suburbs for integration, said I had a hard time reconciling her lack of piety with her letter, which I read back to her about wanting her kids to mix freely with children of other classes and races, which we were not able to provide for them when we lived in the west.

Trust or super? Yeah, yeah. You remember.

you remember feeling that way.

Well, I don't really remember feeling that way, and I think that we say a lot of things that are politically correct without even realizing that we are not telling exactly how we feel. So I can't really guarantee that IT was a hundred percent way I felt. I don't really remember probably close to IT. I mean, i'm a liberal, you know.

as a parent, did you do you remember feeling like I hope my kid has experiences outside of just people like like them?

Not especially I mean, we we rush right away to send them to private school, right? You know. So, uh, most important to us was that I get the best education.

But one of the things have changed. IT was same school, uh, sort of progressive school, with this mad head master who was brilliant opened up saying the hand. And if you keep working on this, you will hear a lot about saying, as i'm not .

going to tell you a lot about sands, except to say this is one of the most prominent private schools in brooklin upsal, neither hood, prime real estate, lots of heavy hitters on their kids. The same names I had heard of IT.

What I didn't know is that saints opened at the very same time that black parents were waging their strongest fight for integration in new york city in one thousand fixy five rate, when a lot of the literature would have been looking for schools. And IT wasn't just seen new progressive private schools were opening and expanding all over the city. Brooklin france school expanded into a new building and would double its enrollment.

They're opening private schools in the south, too. But down there, IT was all very explicit. They became known as quote and quote segregation, academies, schools for weight, people who were whole hardest committed to avoiding integration in the north.

Private schools opened as if they were completely disconnected from everything else that was happening. That moment, saniel marketed itself as a pioneer, a community of like minded, gifted kids. No grades, lots to talk about, progressive child center education, the whole child. At one point in my conversation with Carol meter, I was talking about how integration was happening around this time. And SHE surprised me by saying, no.

not at that time. I think, I think that you may be off on the timing for me because I was too early. They didn't start really any kind of cruel said about integrating too well after I had left the no.

they were integrating the schools in the sixties though.

Oh, IT IT didn't make much of a flash. We weren't against IT. IT wasn't a big item. That's how easy .

IT was to walk away from integration in york city. You can do IT without even knowing you throwing a amb over your shoulder on the way out. Here is what I think happened over those five years between the writing of the letters in one thousand nine hundred and sixty three, and not sending their kids at the school in one thousand nine eight.

Those five years were a battle between the board of education definition of integration and the actual integration that black parents wanted. For black parents. Integration was about safe schools for their children with qualified teachers and functioning toilets, a full day of school for them.

Integration was a remedy for injustice. The board of ed, though, took that definition and retook IT. Integration wasn't a means to an end.

IT was about racial harmony and diversity. The board spun integration into a virtue that White parents could feel good about and their side traut. That's the definition of integration that stuck that still with us today.

It's the versions of integration that was being celebrated fifty years later at the french cultural services building at the gala for sas. In some of my calls with the White letter raters, a few people mentioned that, yes, they wanted integration, but also they wanted the school closer to them. They weren't comfortable sending their kids over to the other side of the neighborhood.

Which brings me to one final letter from the other side of the neighbor od. When I haven't told you about from the I S. Two ninety three folder in the archives, it's one of the only letters, as far as I can tell, that is not from a White parent.

It's from the tenants association for the goanese houses, a housing project home to mostly black importer and families. They also wanted a school closer to them. The letter from the tennis association is formal and straight forward.

IT says, please build the school on the original site you proposed right next to the projects. That way they explain our kids won't have to cross many streets, will get recreation facilities, which we desperately need, and it'll be close to the people who will actually use IT. The letter says they represent over a thousand families, the weight families, they numbers a couple dozen still in the name of integration.

The weight literature got what they want IT a new building close to where they lived that they did not attend. Note the black importer and families. We're not asking to share a school with weight people.

They were not seeking integration. That's not what the letter was about. They were asking for a school period. The school they got was three blocks further than they wanted. And from the moment I opened I S two ninety three was the factor, segregated and overwhelmed. Ly black important in school.

What were those years like? Once the way parents pushing their priorities, once there were no more efforts that feel good integration and the community was finally left alone, was that Better? That's next time. A nice way, parents.

Nice wife parents is produced by july snider and me with editing on this episode from sarchin ic Nancy updike and iron glass neil jump is our managing editor e viewing and Rachel lissy or editorial consultants fact checking and research by ben fAiling with additional research from lilly Sullivan, archival research by her back account, music supervision and mixing by stone Nelson, our director of Operations is suthin.

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