Boycott Cripples City Schools

A peaceful one‐day boycott emptied hundreds of classrooms in Negro and Puerto Rican sections of the city yesterday and kept many pupils at home elsewhere in the city.

School authorities said that 464,361 pupils, or 44.8 per cent of the total enrollment of 1,037,757, had not attended classes.

Since the normal absentee rate is 10 per cent—a little more than 100,000 pupils—this means that the absences yesterday totaled about 360,000 more than the daily average.

The protest against racial imbalance started in the gloom of an icy morning, with pickets marching at 300 of the city’s 860 public schools. It culminated with a cheerful, orderly march by 3,500 demonstrators, mostly children, on Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn.

The police were everywhere, but there was little for them to do. The pickets‐2,600 of them —braving the blustery winds of a 20‐degree morning, made no effort to interfere with pupils or teachers who entered the schools.

Friction at a Minimum

With few exceptions, pickets were courteous and disciplined. The police were equally polite, and there was a minimum of friction between the two groups.

However, some parents said at the day’s end that they had kept their children out of school because of the fear of violence.

As the pickets marched they chanted “Jim Crow must go,” sang “We Shall Overcome” and handed out leaflets.

Teachers also joined the demonstration. Of the total of 43,865 in the system, 3,537 were absent yesterday. The absentee rate was 8.03 per cent, compared with 3 per cent on normal days. 

Rustin Hails ‘Success’

Bayard Rustin, who directed the boycott, called the demonstration “a tremendous success.” He said it was the largest civil rights protest in the nation’s history.

Mr. Rustin directed last summer’s civil rights March on Washington, in which more than 200,000 demonstrators took part.

More significant than the statistics of yesterday’s protest, Mr. Rustin said, was the fact that the Negro and Puerto Rican communities had joined together to work for common objectives.

Mrs. Thelma Johnson, Manhattan coordinator for the protest, described the boycott as a “whoopee success.”

Her view was not shared by James B. Donovan, the president of the Board of Education, who called the boycott a “fizzle.”

“All these people proved,” Mr. Donovan said, “is how easy it is to get children to take a holiday instead of going to school. They also showed that parents could be frightened into keeping their children at home by a campaign of intimidation and threats of possible violence.”

He referred to a statement made over the weekend by the Rev. Milton A. Galamison, chairman of the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools, that “sociopaths” might take advantage of the boycott to cause trouble.

James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, later replied to Mr. Donocan’s evaluation of the boycott.

“If this is a fizzle, we want more fizzles like this,” Mr. Farmer said.

4 Initial Sponsors

CORE was one of the four initial sponsors of the boycott. The others were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Parents Workshop for Equality and the Harlem Parents Committee. Other groups taking part in the protest included the Urban League of Greater New York and the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights.

The boycott leaders. Mr. Rustin and Mr. Galamison, appeared on television last night with Gilberto Gerena-Valentin of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights, Frederick C. McLaughlin, director of the Public Education Association, and Stanley H. Lowell, chairman of the City Commission on Human Rights.

In a special program on WABC-TV they analyzed the boycott.

Mr. Rustin called for the dismissal of Mr. Donovan, saying that his comments about the strike made it evident he did not have the “insight for the job” of president of the Board of Education.

During the day, some children attended improvised classrooms, known as Freedom Schools, that had been set up in churches and other community centers.

The Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools, which coordinated the boycott, also had set up emergency classrooms. Officials of the committee said that 90,000 to 100,000 students were in these classrooms yesterday.

But a spot check showed that many of these classes were not well attended. Boycotting students apparently preferred to take the day off or to participate in the demonstrations.

In the public schools, those with predominantly Negro or Puerto Rican student-bodies were the ones most affected. Some schools in white sections suffered only slight dips in attendance. Mr. Rustin estimated that a fifth of the demonstrators were whites.

100 Out of 1,350

At Junior High School 139 in Harlem, only 100 of 1,350 pupils attended. At Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, only 350 students of 2,300 were present.

Schools in the neighborhoods bordering on predominantly Negro or Puerto Rican sections of the city had higher attendance figures, but even in these fringe areas many classrooms had only a sprinkling of pupils.

Opinions on yesterday’s boycott were freely expressed by many people.

"I think it is one of the essential things in a democracy to learn that we have democracy by pressure,” said Donald Morey, a white teacher of geography at Seward Park High School. “It’s all pressure. You lean on the door and it opens. That’s why I’m picketing."

"I can’t understand what these people want", Mrs. Julia Stitch of 351 West 24th Street said as she passed by a picket line. “They have more freedom in our city than anywhere else. When I went to school they didn’t allow such nonsense."

Gudrun Stiskovsky, 17 years old, a white senior at Seward Park High School, said: “I believe in integration. And I believe in being active-not passive. I don’t think it’s right to believe in these things and then sit home and let other people do the job."

Parents Accompany Children

Throughout the city parents cases accompanied their children to school because of a fear of what might happen.

Shortly after A.M., two white mothers approached a police sergeant at the main gate of Andrew Jackson High School, Cambria Heights, Queens. Forty per cent of the school’s enrollment is Negro.

“We’re worried,” one of the mothers said. “We’re afraid that if our daughters go into the school, there will be trouble later."

The sergeant, also white, reassured them:

“There’s not a thing to worry about, ladies,” he said. “The pickets have been well-behaved. There hasn’t been a word exchanged between them and the kids who have gone through the line this morning."

The mothers appeared relieved. They said good-by to their daughters, and the children entered the school without incident.

“It’s a holiday,” said a Negro teen‐age picket in Harlem. “Why should we go to school?”

But a white student at the Bronx High School of Science stopped chanting “Jim Crow must go” long enough to explain that she felt that the integration problem was the most important one facing the nation.

“It’s up to the young people to show the adults how we feel,” she said.

The official view of the boycott was contained in a joint statement issued by Mr. Donovan and Dr. Calvin E. Gross, the Superintendent of Schools. They deplored the fact that so many pupils missed school and called upon all members of the community to help the system achieve its integration aims.

Dr. Gross, who resumed active duties yesterday after being away from his office for four weeks because of illness, sent his two school‐age children to school. They walked past 20 pickets outside the virtually all‐white Public School 81 at Riverdale Avenue and West 256th Street in the Bronx.

Mr. Galamison, as he had said he would, kept his 14‐year‐old son, Milton, Jr. home from the integrated private school he normally attends. The youngster helped out at boycott headquarters in his father’s church, the Siloam Presbyterian Church, 260 Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn.

The number of pupils absent from public school yesterday exceeded all but the most optimistic predictions of civil rights spokesmen.

They had called the demonstration to register their dissatisfaction with the school system’s integration plan, which was announced last week, and to press their demand for racial integration of all schools in the city.

‘Ghetto’ Schools First

The board’s plan provided for the desegregation of about 30 of the city’s “ghetto” schools —those whose enrollment is more than 90 per cent Negro or Puerto Rican.

Civil rights leaders emphasized last night that they would call additional one‐day demonstrations and perhaps a protracted boycott if school officials did not come up with an integration plan acceptable to them. However, Mr. Donovan reiterated that he would not be swayed by pressure tactics.

A Board of Education report showed that the pupil absentee rate for the city school districts ranged from 11.2 per cent for Districts 53 and 54 in Staten Island, which have no predominantly Negro schools, to 92 per cent for Districts 10 and 11 in Central Harlem.

In schools in the south Bronx, which are heavily Negro, the absentee rate was 82 per cent; in the districts from central Harem to Washington Heights, the rate was 73.5 per cent. Attendance was better in the predominantly white sections in the northwest part of Manhattan.

In the largely Negro Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and its racially mixed fringe areas, about three‐fourths of the children were absent.

Heavy absences were also reported by schools on the Lower East Side, the West Side of Manhattan and East Harlem as well as various sections of Brooklyn, where there are large concentrations of Puerto Rican pupils. In Queens, schools in the southeast, which are heavily Negro, were most seriously affected.

The boycott hit schools on all levels—high schools, elementary schools and junior high schools. Nearly 61,000 of 204,000 pupils were absent in the academic high schools, and 15,604 of 38,459 students were out in the vocational high schools.

Negro and Puerto Rican pupils comprise 40.5 per cent of the city’s public school enrollment.

Yesterday, designated as Freedom Day, pickets turned out before dawn at many schools. hours before the scheduled start of classes at 8:45. The early demonstrators said they wanted to take part before going to work. As some of the men left, women — including housewives with baby carriages—and students took up the picket signs. At one Bronx school, a student picket captain directed teachers in the line.

At George Washington High School in upper Manhattan, the principal, Henry T. Hillson, ordered coffee sent to the pickets. He said the demonstrators were “terribly misguided.” But he added: “We’re not going to let them freeze to death.”

While 50 students and teachers marched the picket line, a few boys gathered on a corner and shouted: “Two‐four‐six-eight — we don’t want to integrate.” The police shooed the boys away. They also dispersed 100 students who were outside the building, telling them to “go to school or go home, but don’t stay here.”

In the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Puerto Rican pickets carried signs in Spanish. One read “Integración es una gran educación.”

Miss Dorothy Bonawit, principal of Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, where about 160 per cent of the 4,600 pupils were absent said that the demonstrators displayed “earnest conviction.”

“I think the cold weather kept the lunatic fringe away,” she added.

‘One Way to Improve’

At De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a teacher, her teeth chattering from the cold, explained why she had not gone to work.

“I used to teach in Harlem,” she said. “I know the conditions there—the water flowing from the toilets into the halls the doors hanging by one hinge, the children crowded in classrooms. I feel that the only way to improve things there—and everywhere in the system—is to integrate and improve all schools.”

Kenneth Hines, a 13‐year‐old student at Junior High School 139 in Harmel, went to class because, he said, it was “more important to get an education than to demonstrate.” He said that there were rats in the cafeteria, but “things aren’t too bad at this school.”

The turnout of 2,600 pickets was below the prediction of the boycott leaders, who had said they expected 8,000 to join the lines. This gave rise to early optimism at Board of Education headquarters that the boycott was not effective.

Because of the cold, some picket captains cut short the demonstrations before 11:45 A.M., the scheduled time to halt the picketing. The Bronx demonstrators then went to Governor Rockefeller’s New York office at 20 West 55th Street; the Manhattan pickets went first to City Hall and then to School headquarters in Brooklyn, where they joined protesters from that borough and from Queens.

Dick Gregory, the Negro comedian, was a teacher at a Freedom School at boycott headquarters for 39 Negro pupils and one white child. He told the children that they would have to be “little soldiers” in the battle for Negro freedom.

Neighborhood movie houses in some sections reported that business was better than usual. The RKO Regent in Harlem, which had a double bill of “The Haunted Palace” and “Cry of Battle,” said children lined up at noon but were not admitted until 3 o’clock.

At the Golden Gloves Billiard Parlor, 221 West 116th Street, Frank Chappell, manager, said “business was very good for a weekday morning.” At one table, a junior from Benjamin Franklin High School was more concerned about his game than about the boycott.