Nice White Parents - Ep. 2: ‘I Still Believe in It’
Serial
Deep Dive
- White parents in 1963 wrote letters advocating for an integrated school.
- None of these parents sent their kids to the school when it opened.
- The reasons for not sending their kids varied, including divorce, political ambitions, and moving to the suburbs.
Shownotes Transcript
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.
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