2: 'I Still Believe in It' AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Nice White Parents

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Episode: 2: 'I Still Believe in It'

Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:53:26

Episode Shownotes

Chana Joffe-Walt searches the New York City Board of Education archives for more information about the School for International Studies, which was originally called I.S. 293.In the process, she finds a folder of letters written in 1963 by mostly white families in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. They are asking for the

board to change the proposed construction of the school to a site where it would be more likely to be racially integrated.It’s less than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, amid a growing civil rights movement, and the white parents writing letters are emphatic that they want an integrated school. They get their way and the school site changes — but after that, nothing else goes as planned. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts. To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter. Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [email protected]

Summary

In the second episode of 'Nice White Parents,' the narrative explores the historical advocacy of white parents in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, for the integration of the School for International Studies (formerly I.S. 293) in 1963. These parents sought a school closer to their community to promote racial integration, a drive influenced by the ideals set by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Despite their initial enthusiasm, five years later, not a single parent enrolled their child at the newly integrated school. Through the lens of various perspectives, including that of May Mallory, the episode critically examines the complexities and contradictions surrounding integration efforts, the ongoing segregation in New York City schools, and the differing motivations between white families and Black parents regarding educational equity.

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Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_10
These first two episodes of Nice White 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 Times shows. And it's super easy.

00:00:15 Speaker_10
You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done.

00:00:25 Speaker_13
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.

00:00:41 Speaker_13
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.

00:00:55 Speaker_13
You sit at a table, and a librarian rolls your boxes up to you on a cart. Inside the boxes are all the dramas of a school system. Big ones. Tiny ones. Bureaucratic. Personal. It's all in there. There's a union contract. And then a zoning plan.

00:01:10 Speaker_13
And special reports on teacher credentialing. A weird personal note from a bureaucrat to his assistant. A three-page, single-spaced plea from Cindy's grandmother, who would please like for her not to be held back in the second grade.

00:01:24 Speaker_13
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. Miss Fitzgerald says when I go in the Army, I will be expendable.

00:01:40 Speaker_13
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.

00:01:54 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:05 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:13 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:23 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:40 Speaker_13
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.

00:02:54 Speaker_13
Dear Mr. Rubin, my husband and I were educated in public schools and we very much want for our children to have this experience.

00:03:02 Speaker_13
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.

00:03:11 Speaker_13
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.

00:03:28 Speaker_13
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.

00:03:42 Speaker_13
The Board of Education was proposing to build the school right next to some housing projects. The school would be almost entirely black and Puerto Rican. These parents, white parents, came in and said, no, no, no, don't build it there.

00:03:55 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:11 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:23 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:34 Speaker_13
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.

00:04:48 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:03 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:15 Speaker_13
They probably followed the news of the civil rights movement unfolding down South. Maybe they were supporters or active in the movement themselves.

00:05:23 Speaker_13
These were white parents saying, we understand we're at a turning point, and we have a choice to make right now, and we choose integration.

00:05:32 Speaker_13
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.

00:05:47 Speaker_13
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 a Westchester suburb.

00:06:01 Speaker_13
So this is the letter.

00:06:02 Speaker_05
This is the letter that I wrote?

00:06:05 Speaker_13
I can't believe it. Okay. This is Carol Netzer. Most of the letter writers were not that hard to find.

00:06:12 Speaker_05
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.

00:06:30 Speaker_05
But living, I don't know if you've ever lived in a suburb, it's just boring, tedious, you know? There's nothing going on.

00:06:37 Speaker_13
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.

00:06:49 Speaker_05
— But it sounds as though I was fairly impassioned about it, you know, that it meant something. But actually, I can't think what it meant.

00:07:04 Speaker_13
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 and all.

00:07:14 Speaker_13
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 IS-293. From Serial Productions, I'm Chana Jaffe-Walt.

00:07:33 Speaker_13
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.

00:07:47 Speaker_13
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.

00:07:59 Speaker_13
And here was a group of white parents who supported the movement for school integration, threw their weight behind it.

00:08:06 Speaker_13
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?

00:08:26 Speaker_13
These white parents who wanted an integrated IS-293, they didn't come to that idea on their own. They were part of a bigger story unfolding around them.

00:08:37 Speaker_13
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.

00:08:47 Speaker_13
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.

00:08:58 Speaker_13
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.

00:09:11 Speaker_13
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.

00:09:24 Speaker_13
And notably, it celebrated itself, calling Brown, quote, 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.

00:09:44 Speaker_13
The film opens with a multiracial choir of schoolchildren singing, Let Us Break Bread Together. Like I said, the Board of Ed went the extra mile.

00:09:55 Speaker_13
The school superintendent was a 66-year-old man named Dr. William Janssen, a man the newspapers described as slow and steady. And he definitely delivers on that promise here.

00:10:05 Speaker_09
— The film you are about to see tells the story of how the schools and community are working together to build brotherhood.

00:10:16 Speaker_13
A teacher addresses her classroom, filled with children of all races and ethnicities.

00:10:21 Speaker_14
Who among you can give some of the reasons why people left their native lands to come to the United States of America?

00:10:30 Speaker_13
The camera cuts to a white boy, maybe 9 or 10.

00:10:33 Speaker_02
Some came because they wanted to get away from the tyranny and cruelty of kings.

00:10:39 Speaker_13
Then a black girl, around the same age.

00:10:42 Speaker_02
My people are free now. They are proud to be American, but the Negroes were brought here by wicked men who traded in slaves.

00:10:53 Speaker_13
This keeps going, kid to kid.

00:10:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:14 Speaker_13
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.

00:11:29 Speaker_13
No problem here. He 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.

00:11:43 Speaker_13
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.

00:11:59 Speaker_13
But here is what it was actually like to walk into a New York City school in a black neighborhood at this time.

00:12:05 Speaker_01
The school had an awful smell. It was just, oh, it smelled like this county abattoir.

00:12:14 Speaker_13
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.

00:12:29 Speaker_13
She saw an all-black and Puerto Rican school with terrible facilities in disrepair.

00:12:34 Speaker_01
— So my kids told me, they 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 day. So I went to the bathroom, and in 1957, in New York City,

00:12:53 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:12 Speaker_01
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 was. Now imagine what this is like.

00:13:22 Speaker_01
you know, dumping waste on top of waste that's sitting there waiting, you know, accumulating until the water comes. This was why this place smells so bad."

00:13:31 Speaker_13
Mae Mallory says the school had two bathrooms for 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.

00:13:48 Speaker_13
Instead of welcoming these new students and spreading them out, creating 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.

00:14:05 Speaker_13
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.

00:14:16 Speaker_13
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 1,000 kids in a single hallway.

00:14:29 Speaker_13
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.

00:14:43 Speaker_13
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 3. The board was literally giving black kids half an education. In some schools in Harlem, they had triple shifts.

00:14:58 Speaker_13
This made it harder to learn elementary skills — reading, for instance.

00:15:03 Speaker_13
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.

00:15:17 Speaker_13
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.

00:15:38 Speaker_13
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.

00:15:50 Speaker_13
May Mallory says 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.

00:16:00 Speaker_13
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.

00:16:12 Speaker_13
And she learned the schoolyard was closed because pieces of steel from the side of the building had fallen into the yard.

00:16:18 Speaker_01
So when I found out that this was true, I went to the principal. So this principal told me that, well, Mrs. Mallory, you really don't have anything to worry about.

00:16:27 Speaker_01
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.

00:16:38 Speaker_01
And I couldn't believe that here a white man is going to tell a black woman in Holland that a can of peaches is better than your child. I just didn't know what to do, where to go. But I know you're supposed to do something."

00:16:57 Speaker_13
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?

00:17:13 Speaker_13
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.

00:17:21 Speaker_01
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.

00:17:48 Speaker_13
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. What they need is the opportunity.

00:18:02 Speaker_13
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.

00:18:16 Speaker_13
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.

00:18:37 Speaker_13
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.

00:19:02 Speaker_13
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's superintendent, William Janssen, decided school segregation was not his problem.

00:19:17 Speaker_13
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.

00:19:28 Speaker_13
Segregation, Janssen said, is such an unfortunate word. He preferred the phrase racial imbalance or racial separation. The way he saw it, racial imbalance in the schools was just a matter of housing. Neighborhoods were segregated.

00:19:45 Speaker_13
Again, unfortunate, but that had nothing to do with the schools. To make this argument, William Janssen 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.

00:20:01 Speaker_13
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.

00:20:16 Speaker_13
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 looks something like this.

00:20:32 Speaker_13
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.

00:20:42 Speaker_13
The commission would study the schools, discover extreme segregation, lay out solutions.

00:20:49 Speaker_13
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.

00:21:03 Speaker_13
Another commission, another report.

00:21:06 Speaker_13
For instance, there's the Report on the Committee on Integration, a plan for integration, the city's children and the challenge of racial discrimination, redoubling efforts on integration, the Board Commission on Integration, the status of the public school education of Negro and Puerto Rican children in New York City, and

00:21:24 Speaker_13
My favorite, a bound 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.

00:21:42 Speaker_13
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.

00:21:56 Speaker_13
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.

00:22:09 Speaker_13
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.

00:22:26 Speaker_13
No matter how many times reporters would ask the mayor at press conferences, why don't you use that word?

00:22:31 Speaker_07
I don't get lost in terminology. I think the notion of saying we have to diversify our schools is the best way to say it.

00:22:39 Speaker_13
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?

00:22:52 Speaker_12
And how much more time do you need to study the issue? So, to repeat my question, how much longer will it take?

00:22:58 Speaker_07
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.

00:23:11 Speaker_07
So when that diversity task force comes out with a report, I think they're amazing. I think they've done fantastic work. And so far there's a high level of agreement.

00:23:18 Speaker_13
— Mayor de Blasio 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.

00:23:32 Speaker_13
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, quote, extremists who wanted instant integration.

00:23:45 Speaker_13
Superintendent Janssen said, some people want us to build Rome in one day. While the Board of Education was building Rome in 1956, 57, 59, and in 1960, 1962, 63,

00:24:01 Speaker_13
Black parents found each other on PTAs and civil rights organizations, pro-integration groups. They formed new groups, organized sit-ins, boycotts, demanded the board provide a timetable for citywide integration.

00:24:15 Speaker_13
They joined forces with Puerto Rican parents, and their numbers grew.

00:24:20 Speaker_13
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.

00:24:33 Speaker_13
Finally, in 1964, 10 years after Brown v. 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.

00:24:52 Speaker_13
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 boycott.

00:25:09 Speaker_13
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.

00:25:19 Speaker_13
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.

00:25:34 Speaker_13
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.

00:25:43 Speaker_00
— Ma'am, it's a little after 8 o'clock now. How successful has the boycott been so far?

00:25:47 Speaker_08
— Very effective. So far, about 10 children have gone in, and there would be ordinarily 240 children. And 10 have gone into the morning session, which begins at 8 o'clock.

00:25:56 Speaker_00
— But you think you've already seen the results?

00:25:58 Speaker_08
— Yes, we think so. The school is just empty.

00:26:01 Speaker_00
— Does it surprise you?

00:26:03 Speaker_08
No, because we knew how effective we knew. We talked with the parents. We've distributed leaflets. We've been working very hard and we prayed that it would be effective.

00:26:11 Speaker_13
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 and jelly sandwiches, to hand out thousands of leaflets and stencil posters.

00:26:25 Speaker_13
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.

00:26:40 Speaker_13
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 ABC News reporter doesn't ask him why he's there.

00:26:54 Speaker_13
The only thing he asks him about is violence. The kid responds.

00:26:59 Speaker_11
-"We're coming down here today for a peaceful, peaceful... We're not going to be violent. We're just teenagers and kids.

00:27:09 Speaker_06
Do you expect violence here today?

00:27:11 Speaker_11
No, sir. Not at all. Not if... Look at the blue uniform. You ask me, do I expect violence? He gestures to the police on horseback. None of us have any weapons. Horses and... All we want is equal education. That's all. Equal education. Thank you.

00:27:32 Speaker_11
You got all that?

00:27:37 Speaker_13
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.

00:27:56 Speaker_13
The majority wanted integration. After Freedom Day, the Board of Education introduced some small-scale integration plans, and white parents protested.

00:28:22 Speaker_13
With their own marches, they put on their own school boycott, the flip side of Freedom Day, a white boycott. The white parents were far fewer in number, but as far as I can tell, they got 1,000 times more press coverage.

00:28:35 Speaker_14
— Mrs. Karchefsky, are you going to send Johnny back to school now?

00:28:46 Speaker_13
— 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.

00:29:02 Speaker_13
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.

00:29:14 Speaker_13
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.

00:29:32 Speaker_13
How did their vocal support for integration turn lethal? That's after the break.

00:29:40 Speaker_10
This is Sarah Koenig, host of the Serial podcast. If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to the New York Times so you can listen to the rest of it.

00:29:52 Speaker_10
My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffery. So here goes. Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive. Nobody makes them like we make them. But great serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the timeshows.

00:30:09 Speaker_10
The Daily, Ezra Klein, Wirecutter has a new podcast. My advice, though, don't just get an audio subscription. Go big. Subscribe to the paper, all access, the whole magilla.

00:30:21 Speaker_10
Serial is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly I'm kind of cheap, but I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and Serial. I think of the Times as a staple.

00:30:35 Speaker_10
Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to Serial, they both asked me for Times subscriptions. All the cool kids are doing it. So please, sign up. You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

00:30:48 Speaker_10
Or, if you're already a Time subscriber, sign in. It's worth it.

00:30:55 Speaker_13
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.

00:31:10 Speaker_13
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.

00:31:26 Speaker_13
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'd you bail? They had a lot of different reasons. One couple got divorced and moved.

00:31:42 Speaker_13
Another guy told me he had political ambitions that pulled him out of the city.

00:31:46 Speaker_06
We loved our brownstone, but I was involved in a political race. And we needed some money for that.

00:31:57 Speaker_13
So he sold the house and moved the family to the suburbs, where he thought he'd have a better chance running against Republicans.

00:32:04 Speaker_13
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.

00:32:21 Speaker_13
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-293.

00:32:34 Speaker_14
No, as I said, I'm a Quaker.

00:32:37 Speaker_13
But you were a Quaker when you wrote this letter asking for an integrated 293.

00:32:42 Speaker_06
Yes, because I believed in it, but... You weren't planning to send your kid there?

00:32:50 Speaker_13
No.

00:32:51 Speaker_06
No. No.

00:32:55 Speaker_13
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 Henke.

00:33:08 Speaker_13
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.

00:33:23 Speaker_13
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 for junior high school, Elaine visited the school.

00:33:36 Speaker_13
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.

00:33:43 Speaker_15
— 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 chaotic and noisy, and kids were disruptive. kids were doing the wrong things, you know. And kids do.

00:34:06 Speaker_15
I mean, it wasn't that they were nasty kids or, you know, doing any — they were not drugs. It was not drugs. It was just — it just seemed too chaotic to me at the time.

00:34:19 Speaker_13
Alina 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?

00:34:38 Speaker_15
Yes, I'm sure it was.

00:34:40 Speaker_13
And did that have anything to do with the way that you saw the classroom as disruptive and chaotic?

00:34:49 Speaker_15
I would hope 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.

00:35:04 Speaker_13
Did you have reason to think that they weren't well educated?

00:35:08 Speaker_15
Before 293? Well, their reading levels were way down, you know.

00:35:17 Speaker_13
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, way people use, we use to express our racial fears, to express real racial fears.

00:35:33 Speaker_13
Like, do you think that's what was happening with you?

00:35:35 Speaker_15
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.

00:35:52 Speaker_15
And here they are, really unprepared in some way for junior high school. Or, I mean, the reading levels were low.

00:36:02 Speaker_13
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.

00:36:16 Speaker_13
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.

00:36:31 Speaker_13
Her white children had received years of high-quality teaching at well-resourced schools. The kids coming from segregated elementary schools had not had that experience.

00:36:41 Speaker_15
I mean, one of the problems is that many of the white kids had higher sort of academic skills or skills they could read better. I think, I mean, if the white kids knew how to read in first grade, and I guess

00:36:59 Speaker_15
There were black kids who also could, but it just seemed as if most of the black kids, you know, didn't really learn to read. But.

00:37:08 Speaker_13
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.

00:37:20 Speaker_13
And that was part of the argument for integration.

00:37:24 Speaker_15
Yes.

00:37:25 Speaker_13
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.

00:37:36 Speaker_15
Right. I don't know what to say to that. 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?

00:38:00 Speaker_15
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.

00:38:21 Speaker_15
people said that that was racism and of course it was racism but maybe the kids were a little angry at the school. 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.

00:38:38 Speaker_15
I thought the problems were kind of enormous. And I guess I just, at one point I decided that my kids should go on to Brooklyn Friends. And, I mean, we could afford to pay for it. It wasn't easy.

00:38:56 Speaker_13
I mean, you know, but... Did your feelings about integration change? Like, did you believe in it less? Maybe.

00:39:09 Speaker_15
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.

00:39:26 Speaker_13
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.

00:39:41 Speaker_15
I certainly didn't think it would be so difficult. But I was innocent, you know? I don't know. I still believe in it. I do.

00:40:03 Speaker_13
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.

00:40:16 Speaker_13
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.

00:40:32 Speaker_13
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.

00:40:40 Speaker_13
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.

00:40:50 Speaker_13
He'd just moved from China, and his mom asked 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.

00:41:01 Speaker_13
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.

00:41:17 Speaker_13
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.

00:41:33 Speaker_13
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 multiracial choir singing together, building brotherhood.

00:41:52 Speaker_13
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.

00:42:06 Speaker_13
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.

00:42:21 Speaker_13
A large share of the white students at this 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.

00:42:37 Speaker_13
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.

00:42:52 Speaker_13
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.

00:43:06 Speaker_13
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.

00:43:17 Speaker_13
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.

00:43:38 Speaker_13
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.

00:43:48 Speaker_15
I remember thinking very clearly that, OK, 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.

00:44:01 Speaker_15
And for people who sent 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 believed that I

00:44:17 Speaker_15
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.

00:44:37 Speaker_13
You regretted what?

00:44:41 Speaker_15
Well, I kind of wish I had sent them to 293, because Joan's kids had a good experience there.

00:44:48 Speaker_13
Elaine's friend Joan, another white mom, who did send her kids to IS-293. Elaine still feels bad about her choice.

00:44:57 Speaker_05
But not everyone felt bad. We were not a pious kind of, oh, the kids have to go to public school. Not at all. I went to public school. There's nothing to rave about.

00:45:08 Speaker_13
Carol is the woman who wrote the letter about how she'd come to New York City from the suburbs for integration.

00:45:15 Speaker_13
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 a Westchester suburb.

00:45:28 Speaker_13
That was all true. Yeah. Yeah. You remember feeling that way?

00:45:33 Speaker_05
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.

00:45:49 Speaker_05
I don't really remember. Probably close to it. I mean, I'm a liberal, you know?

00:45:54 Speaker_13
As a parent, do you remember feeling like, I hope my kid has experiences outside of just people like them?

00:46:02 Speaker_05
Not especially. I mean, we rushed right away to send them to private school, right? So what was most important to us was that they get the best education. But one of the things that changed it was St.

00:46:15 Speaker_05
Anne's School, a sort of progressive school with this mad headmaster who was brilliant, opened up St. Anne's. And if you keep working on this, you'll hear a lot about St. Anne's.

00:46:26 Speaker_13
— I'm not going to tell you a lot about St. 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 send their kids to St. Anne's. I had heard of it.

00:46:40 Speaker_13
What I didn't know is that St. 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.

00:46:54 Speaker_13
And it wasn't just St. Anne's. New, progressive private schools were opening and expanding all over the city. Brooklyn Friends School expanded into a new building and would double its enrollment. They were opening private schools in the South, too.

00:47:09 Speaker_13
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.

00:47:21 Speaker_13
In the North, private schools opened as if they were completely disconnected from everything else that was happening at that very moment. St.

00:47:30 Speaker_13
Ann'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.

00:47:41 Speaker_13
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.

00:47:53 Speaker_05
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 until well after I had left the neighborhood.

00:48:04 Speaker_13
No, they were integrating the schools in the 60s, though. Oh.

00:48:09 Speaker_05
It didn't make much of a splash, you know? We weren't against it. It wasn't a big item.

00:48:15 Speaker_13
— 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.

00:48:28 Speaker_13
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.

00:48:38 Speaker_13
Those five years were a battle between the Board of Education's definition of integration and the actual integration that Black parents wanted.

00:48:48 Speaker_13
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.

00:49:01 Speaker_13
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.

00:49:19 Speaker_13
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.

00:49:36 Speaker_13
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.

00:49:51 Speaker_13
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.

00:50:05 Speaker_13
It's from the Tenants Association for the Gowanus 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.

00:50:21 Speaker_13
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.

00:50:36 Speaker_13
And it'll be close to the people who will actually use it. The letter says they represent over 1,000 families. The white families, they numbered a couple dozen.

00:50:49 Speaker_13
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.

00:51:04 Speaker_13
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.

00:51:16 Speaker_13
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.

00:51:29 Speaker_13
Once there were no more efforts at feel-good integration. And the community was finally left alone. Was that better? That's next time on Nice White Parents.

00:51:58 Speaker_13
Nice White Parents is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig, Nancy Updike, and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our managing editor. Eve Ewing and Rachel Lissy are editorial consultants.

00:52:11 Speaker_13
Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan, with additional research from Lily Sullivan. Archival Research by Rebecca Kent. Music Supervision and Mixing by Stowe Nelson. Our Director of Operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our Digital Manager.

00:52:24 Speaker_13
Finance Management by Cassie Howley. And Production Management by Frances Swanson. Original Music for Nice White Parents is by The Bad Plus, with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley.

00:52:36 Speaker_13
A thank you to all the people and organizations who helped provide archival sound for this episode, including the Moreland Springer Research Center, Andy Lancet at WNYC, Ruta Abolins and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives at the University of Georgia, and David Mendt, Dwight Johnson, and all the other people at the Board of Education Archives.

00:52:56 Speaker_13
Special thanks to Francine Almash, Jean Theoharis, Matt Delmont, Paula Marie Seniors, Anita Bach, Ashley Farmer, Sherilyn Ifill, Monifa Edwards, Charles Isaacs, Nogli Ray Rooks, Gerald Poder, and Judith Kafka.

00:53:20 Speaker_13
Nice White Parents is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times company.