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 and years is sitting in boxes in the municipal building. I love the BOE archive. First of all, to look through it, you have to go to a century-old municipal building downtown.
Arched doorways, lots of marble and echo, vaulted ceilings. It 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 and apart. Inside the boxes are all the dramas of the school system.
Big ones, tiny ones, bureaucratic, personal. It's all in there. There's a union contract, and then a zoning plan, and special reports on teacher credentialing. 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. An historian friend once pulled a folder out of the archive, and a note fell out, something a teacher clearly made a kid write in the 1950s, that read, quote, I am a lazy boy. Ms. Fitzgerald says when I go in the army, I will be expendable.
Expendable 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 by the French Embassy, the fundraiser for SIS organized by the new upper-class white families coming into the school.
I felt like I'd just watched an unveiling ceremony for a brand-new school, but I didn't really know what it was replacing. Everyone was talking as if this was the first time white parents were taking an interest in the school for international studies. But at the archive, I found out it wasn't the first time. White parents had invested in the school before, way before, at the very beginning of the school, before the beginning.
I found a folder labeled IS-293, Intermediate School 293, the original name for SIS. 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 IS-293 an integrated school. Dear Mr. Rubin, 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 a school which will give them a good education, and today that is synonymous 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 she will be a member of a small, white, middle-income clique.
These are letters from parents, largely white parents, as far as I could tell, written in 1963, just a few years before IS-293 was built. At issue was where the school was going to be built. The Board of Education was proposing to build the school right next to some housing projects. The school would be almost entirely black in Puerto Rican.
These parents, white parents, came in and said, no, no, no, don't build it there. Put it closer to the white neighborhood. That way, all our kids can go to school together. These parents wanted 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 neighborhood 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's theory of fringe schools is applied. And from another letter, It is apparent from the opinion of the neighborhood 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 Brooklyn in the 1960s, feeling good about the future. They would have had their children around the time the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v.
Board of Education. They probably followed the news of the civil rights movement unfolding down south. Maybe they were supporters or active in the movement themselves. These are white parents saying, We understand we're at a turning point, and we have a choice to make right now.
And we choose integration. One of my favorite letters was from a couple who left the suburbs to come to New York City for integration, the opposite of white flight. Dear Mr. Rubin, We have recently moved into the home we purchased at the above address in Cobble Hill.
It was our hope in moving into the neighborhood 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 the Westchester suburb. So this is the letter. This is the letter that I wrote? I can't believe it.
Okay. This is Carol Netzer. Most of the letterators were not that hard to find. We had moved to Scarsdale for the children because Scarsdale has the best, and probably still does, the best school system in the country.
But we hated it. We found that we were bored to death with it. It was bland. It was just homogenous.
But living, I don't know if you've ever lived in a suburb. It's just boring. It's tedious, you know. There's nothing going on.
She didn't like the suburbs. So they moved to Brooklyn and wrote that letter, which I showed her, her 37-year-old self, writing about her hopes for her young children, the choices she made back then. But it sounds as though I was fairly unfashioned about it, you know, that it meant something. But actually, I can't think what it meant.
I went through this box of letters and called as many parents as I could. Most of them didn't remember writing these letters, which isn't surprising, more than 50 years ago in all. What I did find surprising is that by the time 293 opened, five years later, none of them, not a one, actually sent their kids to IST93. From Serial Productions, I'm Clona Jaffe-Walt.
This is Nice White Parents, a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block. A relationship that began with a commitment to integration. In the 1960s, much like today, white people were surrounded by a movement for the civil rights of black Americans. White people were forced to contend with systemic racism.
And here was a group of white parents who supported the movement for school integration, threw their weight behind it. What happened in those five years, between 1963, when these white parents planted an impassioned pro-integration flag on the school, and 1968, when it came time to enroll their children? Why didn't they show up? These white parents, who wanted an integrated IST93, they didn't come to that idea on their own.
They were part of a bigger story unfolding around them. I want 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 this historical tale, the recipient of the parents' letters, the New York City Board of Education. Back in the 1950s, the New York City Board of Ed was not one of those boring bureaucracies that chugs along in the background keeping its head down.
It had personality. It invested in self-image. For instance, in 1954, when the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, New York City didn't just say, we support that ruling. It celebrated the Brown v.
Board decision. And notably, it celebrated itself, calling Brown, a moral reaffirmation of our fundamental educational principles. That same year, 1954, the New York City Board of Ed made a film honoring multiculturalism in its schools. The film opens with a multiracial choir of school children singing Let Us Break Bread Together.
Like I said, the Board of Ed went the extra mile. The school superintendent was a 66-year-old man named Dr. William Jansen, a man the newspapers described as slow and steady, and he definitely delivers on that promise here. The film you are 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 and ethnicities. Who among you can give some of the reasons why people left their native lands 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 kings.
Then a black girl, around the same age. My people are free now. They are proud to be Americans, but the Negroes were brought here by wicked men who traded and slays. This keeps going, kid to kid.
We came a little while ago from Puerto Rico. 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 farm. New York City was the biggest city in America with the largest black population in America, and it was saying in films, press releases, public speeches, Brown v. Board, we agree. Separate but equal has no place in the field of public education.
No problem here. It was also saying, you know who does have a problem? The South. New York City loved comparing itself to the backward South.
There are plenty of examples of this in the board archives. New Yorkers bragging about their superiority to places like Georgia or Virginia or Louisiana. This was the story the Board of Ed was telling. The South was ignorant and racist.
New York City was enlightened and integrated. But here's what it was actually like to walk into a New York City school in a black neighborhood at this time. The school had an awful smell. It was this, oh, it smelled like this county abattoir.
This is an archival recording of a woman named May Mallory. In the 1950s, Mallory's two black children were students in Harlem. And when Mallory walked into their school, she did not see children building brotherhood in interracial classrooms. She saw an all-black and Puerto Rican school with terrible facilities in disrepair.
So my kids told me, she said, well, Mommy, this is what we've been trying to tell you all along, that this place is so dirty. And this is why we run home to the bathroom every night. So I went to the bathroom. And in 1957, in New York City, they had toilets that were worse than the toilets in the schools that I went to in Macon, Georgia in the heart of the South.
The toilet was a thing that looked like horse stalls. And then it had one long board with holes cut in it. And then you'd have to go and use the toilet, but you couldn't flush it. The water would come down periodically and flush, you know, whatever that.
Now imagine what this is like, you know, dumping waste on top of waste that's sitting there waiting, you know, accumulating until the water comes. This is why this place smelled so bad. Name Mallory says the school had two bathrooms with 1,600 children. Mallory's family fled 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 interracial classrooms, the Board of Education kept black and Puerto Rican students segregated in what were sometimes referred to as ghetto schools, schools that were often just blocks away from white schools. White schools in New York City had toilets that flushed. White children had classrooms with experienced teachers and principals, people who lived in their communities and looked like them. In black and Puerto 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 overcrowding got so bad, the Board of Education decided to send kids to school in shifts. And mind you, this was not in the middle of a global pandemic. This was normal, non-crisis school for black and Puerto Rican 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 an 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 white 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 dual, 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. May Mallory said she visited her kids' school that day because they'd come home the day before and told her a child had died at school.
He was playing in the street at recess. Mallory hardly believed it, but she says when she visited the school, she learned, yes, indeed, this child was playing in the street because the schoolyard was closed. He was hit by a beer truck. And she learned the schoolyard was closed because pieces of steel from the side of the building so this principal told me that, well, Mrs.
Mallory, you really don't have anything to worry about. You see, our Sunshine Club went to see the mother, and we took her a bag of canned goods. So actually, she's better off because she had so many children to feed. And I couldn't believe that here a white man is going to tell a black woman in Harlem that a can of peaches is better than your child.
I just didn't know what to do or where to go. But I know you're supposed to do something. It was 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregation by law unconstitutional. New York City didn't have Jim Crow laws on the books, but May Mallory would ask, the schools are segregated.
What's the difference? She didn't care whether that segregation was codified by law or by convention. The harm was just as dire, and she wanted it addressed. Now, this was nothing to do with wanting to sit next to white folks, but it was obvious that a whole pattern of black retardation was the program of the Board of Education.
So I filed suit against the Board of Education, and I just fought back. Integration, May Mallory 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, but they need is the opportunity. The Board of Education had defined integration as a multiracial choir.
It was a virtue in and of itself. May Mallory 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. May Mallory 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 cagey, and that cageyness set the stage for the IS-293 parents when it came time to send their kids to the school.
Here's what happened. The school superintendent, William Jansen, decided school segregation was not his problem. In fact, he rejected the idea that New York City had segregated schools in the first place. After all, New York City was not barring black children from entering white schools.
This wasn't the South. Segregation, Jansen said, is such an unfortunate word. He preferred the phrase racial imbalance or racial separation. The way he thought racial imbalance in the schools was just a matter of housing.
Neighborhoods were segregated. Again, unfortunate, but that had nothing to do with the schools. To make this argument, William Jansen 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 experienced teachers teach. There were many ways the Board could have made schools less segregated.
I know this because of the Board's own reports. Jansen 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 1950s that looked 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 lay out solutions the board of ed would then take a tiny step toward implementing some of the recommendations until white 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's the report on the committee on integration a plan for integration the city's children the challenge of racial discrimination redoubling efforts on integration the board commission on integration the status of the public school education of negro and portrican children in new york city and my favorite abound little red book from 1960 called toward greater opportunity which summarizes the previous investigations with this groundbreaking conclusion quote we must integrate as much and as quickly as we can i want to pause 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 york city we've been reliving this chapter of history it's eerie new york 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 bill de blasio 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 isn't 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 i don't get lost in terminology i think the notion of saying that diversify our schools is the best way to say it i heard a live call-in show on wnyc the public radio station a young integration advocate an 11th grader named tiffany torres asked the mayor how much longer until you do something and how much more time do you need to study the issue so repeat my question how much longer will it take tiffany with all due respect i really think you're not hearing what we're saying to you so i'll repeat it there is a task force an extraordinary task force which i've met with they are coming forward with their next report in a matter of weeks so when that uh diversity task force i think they're amazing i think they've done fantastic work and so far there's a high level mayor glasio likes to point out that this was a problem created by people long before him which is exactly what people long before him said too in the late 1950s when black parents and civil rights activists also asked the board of ed why is it taking so long board members complained about the vote extremists who wanted instant integration superintendent jansen said some people want us to build rome in one day while the board of education was building rome in 1956 57 59 and 1960 1962 63 black parents found each other on ptas and civil rights organizations pro-integration groups they form new groups organized incidents boycotts demanded the board provide a timetable for city-wide integration they joined forces with puerto rican parents and their numbers grew these were volunteers mothers mostly who left their jobs at the end of a workday and headed directly to a meeting about how to get the board to give their kids the education white children were already receiving finally in 1964 10 years after brown versus board black and puerto rican parents 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 a civil rights demonstration that was the largest in u.s history larger than the march on washington it was called freedom day a massive school on february 3rd 1964 parents headed out to schools in the morning before sunrise to spread the word about the boycott it was freezing cold that day there's a brief tv news clip of a group of mothers picketing outside their kids school at 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 for all they're handing out leaflets to other parents about freedom day looking spirited and cold a white nbc news reporter in a fedora walks up to one of the women there were maps and charts and instructions with picket times and picket captains for hundreds of schools there were volunteer shifts to make peanut butter jelly sandwiches to hand out thousands of leaflets and stencil posters the boycott wasn't just effective it was extraordinarily effective half a million kids stayed home from school that day 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 a teenage boy maybe around 16 on the street with some friends protesting a white adc news reporter doesn't ask him why he's there the only thing he asked him about is violence the kid responds uh we're coming down here today for a peaceful peaceful we're not we're not going to be violence we're just teenagers and kids do you expect violence today no sir not not if uh look at look at the blue uniform if you ask me to expect violence violence he gestures to the police on horseback none of us have any weapons horses and uh all we want is equal education that's all equal education thank you that was it every once in a while i'll hear a politician or friend or school administrator say yeah integration was a good idea but there was no political will to make it happen 460,000 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 white parents protested with their own marches they put on their own school boycott the flip side of freedom day the white boycott the white parents were far fewer in number but as far as i can tell they got a thousand times more press coverage this protest worked the board of ed backed off and in the decades since the board of education has never proposed a citywide integration plan the schools have never been integrated i think the fact of white moms in queens in the 1960s yelling about zoning changes and busing 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 white parents who said they supported it parents like the ones who wrote letters asking for an integrated is 293 how did their vocal support for integration turn lethal that's after the break in the american south schools were desegregated with court orders cities and counties mandated desegregation and the schools desegregated by the early 1970s 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 hearts and minds they wanted to sell white people on the virtues of integration have it all happen quote naturally some white people were sold the white parents who wrote letters about is 293 they believed in integration so i made a lot of calls to ask why do you bail they had a lot of different reasons one couple got divorced and moved another guy told me he had political ambitions that pulled him out of the city we loved our brownstone um but uh i was involved in a political race and uh we needed some money for that so he sold the house and moved the family to the suburbs where he thought he'd have a better chance running against republicans many white people moved to the suburbs for jobs for newly paved roads and subsidized mortgages leaving brooklyn behind i understood what happened there but some explanations made less sense like one guy i called he did stay in brooklyn on the phone he was telling me why he believed it was important that is 293 be integrated but then he said his own kids went to brooklyn friends a quaker private school i said oh they didn't go to is no i said i'm a quaker and you were a quaker when you wrote this letter asking for an integrated i believe in i believed in it but but um you weren't planning to send your 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 elaine hanky of all the people i spoke with everything about elaine indicated someone who did believe in integration someone who would send her kids to 293 and yet she didn't elaine was a public school teacher she taught in an integrated elementary school until she had her own kids she was looking forward to sending them to an integrated 293 when her daughter was old enough from junior high school elaine visited the school she was the only letter writer i spoke with who actually went into the building if this was going to work with anyone it was going to be elaine i i didn't i didn't know quite what to make of it because the school had a nice plan specifically it was a nice school um but it just seemed uh chaotic and noisy and um kids were disruptive and kids were doing the wrong things you know and kids do i mean it wasn't that they were nasty kids or you know doing anything they were not drugs it was not drugs it was just it just seemed too chaotic to me at the time elaine 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 and hispanic kids um yes i'm sure it was and did that have anything to do with the way that you saw the classroom as disruptive and 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 well educated before before 293 their reading levels were way down you know i'm just i mean when you say chaos and disruptive i'm trusting that what you saw was chaotic and disruptive but i also know that those are words you know white people use we use to express our racial fears to express real racial fears like do you think that's what was happening with you i don't think i would admit to that i don't think that was true but what i may have thought was that these kids are not expected to do so well in school all the way from the beginning of school and here they are really unprepared in some way for junior high school or i mean the reading levels were low elaine told me when she wrote that letter to the board of education she pictured her children becoming friends with black kids learning side by side learning that all children are equal that's what motivated her to write that letter she wanted the picture of integration the board of ed was promoting the picture of harmonious integration but when she visited is 293 that didn't seem possible the reading levels were low the kids were not entering the school on equal grounds her white children have received years of high quality teaching at well resourced schools the kids coming from segregated elementary schools have not had that experience i mean one of the one of the problems is that many of the white kids had had higher sort of academic skills or skills they could read better they 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 it 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 in 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 just i guess i just began to feel that things were really difficult for these kids schools were not made for them if the schools were made for them with their background what would they be like i think there was and that's 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 there were more white teachers i suppose people said that that was racism and of course it was racism but maybe the kids were a little angry at the school i wouldn't i couldn't fault them for that but on the other hand then they don't get as much from the school i don't know i thought the problems were kind of enormous and and i guess i just at one point i decided that my kids should i went to brooklyn friends and i mean we could afford to pay for it it wasn't easy i mean you know but did your feelings about integration change like did you believe in it less maybe um i think i would have said no theoretically but maybe they did i guess i saw it as a more difficult project then i sort of i did back off from it i didn't yeah 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 going to be a meaningful project that's also going to be kind of easy i certainly didn't think it would be so difficult but i but i was i was innocent you know i i don't know i still believe in it i do i think what elaine actually meant was not that she was innocent but that she was naive she was naive about the reality of segregation the harm of it and naive about what it would take to undo it she did not know and i think she didn't want to know when elaine said the word innocent i felt a jolt of recognition i felt like elaine had walked me right up to the truth about her and about me when my own kids were old enough i sent them to our zoned public school it was racially mixed and economically mixed i was excited about that and it was nice walking to school with neighbors people i likely never would have gotten to know otherwise my kid's first day of school was another boy's first week in the country he just moved from china and his mom as a neighbor where the school was when she said goodbye 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 watched 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 it was such a sweet picture all of them up there black kids and mexican kids and colombian and asian and white kids and all of us adults supporting all of them it's moving to me this picture of integration it is also i'm realizing right now writing these words down the very same picture the board of education put forth in 1954 a multi-racial choir singing together building brotherhood and it's 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 bypass it entirely i can sit in that assembly and feel good about the gauzy display of integration without ever being asked to think about the fact that much of the time white kids in the school building are having a different educational experience than kids of color a large share of the white students at the school are clustered in a gifted program they have separate classrooms and separate teachers we all blithely call these white children gifted and talented g and t starting at four years old white children are performing better at the school than black children and latino children white families are the loudest and most powerful voices in the building the advantages white kids had back in the 1950s they're still in place when elaine said she was innocent i thought about the things we say nice white parents to each other about why we won't send our kids to segregated schools because they're too strict or too chaotic or too disruptive because the test scores are bad because we want more play we want fewer worksheets because we don't want to ride 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 elaine was not for segregation but in the end she wasn't really for integration either all the choices she made choices she had the luxury of making were meant to advantage her own kids and i understand that that's what parents 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 look at what they will learn and you know what they will do and for people who send their kids to 293 it seemed to work out well so that made me think well maybe i made a mistake maybe they should have gone there i know at one point it was very clear to me that i had beliefs that i that i thought were kind of contrary to my own children's best interests and i decided that i wasn't going to use them to you know to sort of extend my own beliefs but then i regretted that because that wasn't really true you regretted what well i kind of wish i had sent them to 293 because joan's kids had a good experience there elaine's friend joan another white mom who did send her kids to is 293 elaine 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 well i went to public school there's nothing to worry about carol is the woman who wrote the letter about how she'd come to new york city from the suburbs for integration 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 westchester 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 100% the way i felt i don't really remember probably close to it but 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 what was most important to us was that they get the best education but one of the things that changed it was saint anne's school uh sort of progressive school with this mad headmaster who was brilliant opened up saint anne's and if you keep working on this you'll hear a lot about saint anne's i'm not going to tell you a lot about saint anne's except to say this it's one of the most prominent private schools in brooklyn upscale neighborhood prime real estate lots of heavy hitters on their kids to saint anne's i had heard of it what i didn't know is that saint anne's opened at the very same time that black parents were waging their strongest fight for integration in new york city in 1965 right when a lot of the letter writers would have been looking for schools and it wasn't just saint anne's new progressive private schools were opening and expanding all over the city brooklyn friend's school expanded into a new building and would double its enrollment they were opening private schools in the south too but down there it was all very explicit they became known as quote-unquote segregation academies schools for white people who were wholeheartedly committed to avoiding integration in the north private schools opened as if they were completely disconnected from everything else that was happening at that very moment saint anne's marketed itself as a pioneer a community of like-minded gifted kids no grades lots of talk about progressive child-centered education the whole child at one point in my conversation with carol netzer i was talking about how integration was happening around this time and she surprised me by saying no not at that time i think the i think that you may be off on the timing for me because it was too early they didn't start really any kind of crusade about integrating till well after i had left the neighborhood no they were integrating the schools in the 60s though oh it didn't make much of a slash you know we weren't against it it wasn't a big item that's how easy it was to walk away from integration in new york city you could do it without even knowing you'd thrown a bomb over your shoulder on the way out here is what i think happened over those five years between the writing of the letters in 1963 and not sending their kids to the school in 1968 those five years were a battle between the board of education's 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 retooled 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 triumphed that's the definition of integration that stuck that's still with us today it's the version of integration that was being celebrated 50 years later at the french cultural services building at the gala for sis in some of my calls with the white letter writers 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 neighborhood one i haven't told you about from the is 293 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 kiwanis houses a housing project home to mostly black and puerto rican families they also wanted a school closer to them the letter from the tenants association is formal and straightforward 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 we'll get recreational 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 white families they numbered a couple dozen still in the name of integration the white letter writers got what they wanted a new building close to where they lived that they did not attend note the black and puerto rican families were not asking to share a school with white people they were not seeking integration that's not what their 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 it opened is 293 was de facto segregated an overwhelmingly black and puerto rican school what were those years like once the white parents pushing their priorities went away once there were no more efforts to feel good at integration and the community was finally left alone was that better that's next time on nice white parents nice white parents is produced by julie snyder and me with editing on this episode from sarah kanig nancy updick and ira glass neil drumming is our managing editor eve ewing and rachel lissy are editorial consultants fact checking and research by ben balen with additional research from lily sullivan archival research by rebecca kent music supervision and mixing by so nelson our director of operations is stuff wind julie whittaker is our digital manager finance management by cassie howley and production management by francis swanson original music for nice white parents is by the bad plus with additional music written and performed by matt mcginley a thank you to all the people and organizations who helped provide archival sound for this episode including the morland springard research center andy lancet at wnyc ruta avolins and the walter j brown media archives at the university of georgia and david ment dwight johnson and all the other people at the board of education archives special thanks to francine almash jean vio harris matt delmont paula marie seniors amita bach ashley farmer sherilyn eifel monifa edwards charles isaacs noby ray rooks gerald podere and judith kofta thanks for parents is produced by serial productions a new york times company