As Denise Oliver describes in this video, women involved in the civil rights movement faced sexism within their organizations, even when those organizations said they were committed to liberation and freedom.
Like many Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Evelina López Antonetty was frustrated that so many Spanish-speaking children were not learning to read.
New York State’s 1969 decentralization law drew strong opposition from many Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers who had been advocating for community control.
Although City College, where Audre Lorde taught, was in the predominantly Black and Latinx community of Harlem, there were very few Black or Latinx students who attended.
During the 1968 teacher strike, community control advocates continued to participate in leading local school districts and arguing for self-determination in education.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, was one of the three community control demonstration districts in New York City.
The Black Panther Party’s Harlem Branch, founded in 1966, defined Black Power as “having the right to self-determination or the power to decide what should go down in our community,” and “being the decision makers, the policy makers.
In the fall of 1964, months after the massive February 1964 boycott, Reverend Milton Galamison and the Citywide Committee on Integration launched another boycott.
Reverend Milton Galamison was the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and a key figure in the struggle to desegregate New York City’s schools.
