New York City has one of the most segregated public school systems in the United States. After the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, the NYC Board of Education was expected to lead efforts towards school integration. However, its efforts fell short and failed to produce meaningful change, deepening frustration over the New York City educational system’s failure to deliver justice for students of color. This disillusionment ignited the Community Control Movement, a movement which sought to create and advance direct, localized power of local marginalized communities over schools in these three neighborhoods.
Community Control advanced the notion that when marginalized community groups have power over what goes on in schools, they are better equipped to foster successful and empowering educational environments. Furthermore, because New York City’s schools mirrored its residential segregation, advocates pushed for its local schools to be broken up into smaller, autonomous districts, seeking a more immediate and impactful way to transform education with local input. Sharing this vision, parents, activists, organizers, and community members began to challenge a deeply entrenched oppression their children had faced. Consequently, from 1967 to 1969, a coalition of Asian, Black, and Latino working-class families and activists led this fight across three neighborhoods. Three demonstration districts were created in each neighborhood with the help of city leaders and funding from the Ford Foundation, an extremely powerful philanthropic organization.
The most well remembered were Harlem in Manhattan and Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, the latter put into national spotlight during the 1968 Teachers’ Strikes. Both were predominantly Black and Latino communities. The third, often overlooked, was Two Bridges, a multiracial, multiethnic neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, located between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. The perspective of Two Bridges within conversations on Community Control has been under researched, salient by the lack of literature written on the district in comparison to Harlem and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. As a multiracial district, Two Bridges transcended binary expectations of racial justice, instead leading with an approach undergirded by solidarity.
While the 1968 Teachers’ Strike dominates historical narratives of Community Control, it is essential to recenter the story on what truly fueled the movement: the love, solidarity, and coalition building among marginalized New Yorkers who wanted educational and racial justice for children of color.